


Moderation

by betts



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Kid Fic, Mutual Pining, Past Abuse, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past eating disorder, Recovery, Redemption, Reunions, Semi-Public Sex, Slow Burn, men learning to introspect and atone for their bullshit, the ultimate fantasy fulfillment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-03
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-01-04 10:40:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18342002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betts/pseuds/betts
Summary: Step 9: Make amends with those we have harmed.Clarke was the love of Bellamy's life, but he fucked it up, and now, a decade later and three years sober, she's at the top of his list. How can he even begin to make amends for the things he did?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bellofthetolppl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellofthetolppl/gifts).



> This fic is based very loosely on the poem ["Herbert White" by Frank Bidart](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50170/herbert-white) and prompted by [this text post](http://trilliath.tumblr.com/post/165105428317/theres-truly-not-enough-post-breakupdivorce-etc):
>
>> There’s truly not enough post-breakup/divorce etc. and “we fucked up our chance together in our twenties but it’s been ten years and hey, would you look at that we’re both single and actual adults now in a better place for dating” kinds of fics… honestly they’re way more interesting than forced drama and angst and more realistic than pretending like all people meet their soulmates at 23 and never ever fall out of love with them.
> 
> Title from Florence + The Machine's song of the same name.
> 
> Bellamy is a recovering alcoholic and former abuser. Please note that I have chosen not to warn. I've done my best, though, to tag the specific items that I felt needed warned.

Bellamy’s list wasn’t long, thankfully, but he knew he’d caused the people on it an irreparable amount of damage. First there was Miller, whose car Bellamy wrecked back in ‘09. Then there was Kane, who had employed him when no one else would, and Bellamy no-call-no-showed so many times that he got fired, and probably hurt Kane’s reputation with the company. There were Gina and Echo, who tolerated far too much of his bullshit, even in the short time he dated them. There was Octavia, whom he’d lost touch with once their aunt got custody of her; by then he knew he was hellbent on destruction, and he didn’t want her to catch any shrapnel. There was Aurora, too, who was dead and who could never forgive him, but he would offer amends anyway for being a shitty son.

And then there was Clarke. How could he even begin to face the things he’d done to her?

He’d been staring at her Facebook profile for the better part of twenty minutes. She didn’t have him blocked, which surprised him, but all of her info was set to private, which didn’t. In her profile pic, she was looking up and away, making that cute, scrunched not-quite-smile that girls do. She’d always hated smiling in pictures, self-conscious of her teeth. Her hair was up, meticulously curled, face covered in makeup, lips bright red. She looked like she was going somewhere fancy, a wedding or something. Maybe Harper and Monty finally got hitched. Maybe she had completely new friends now, an entire social circle Bellamy never got to meet.

His thumb hovered over Add Friend, then moved to Message, then back to Add Friend. If he messaged her outright, she might not see it. If he added her as a friend, she might misconstrue his intentions and block him. He went to the fridge and stared morosely into it, looking for beer that was never there. He slammed the door shut. Three magnets fell off. He began opening and closing cabinets, finding nothing, no whiskey or wine or even cooking sherry. He’d gotten rid of all of it years ago, and he knew that, but he wanted to see if he’d sabotaged himself somehow, just a little, just one emergency bottle he’d forgotten about, anything. On average, he ripped through his apartment once a month, and every time he was surprised to come up empty.

He got his keys and put on his jacket. He was a grown man. He could do what he wanted. No one had to know. He’d just get a six-pack. Something shitty, PBR or Natty Light. Or a pilsner. Pilsners were, what, five percent? They didn’t count.

He opened his front door and was met with a note taped to the storm door. His own handwriting stared back at him, faded from the years it had been taped up: CALL PIKE YOU MORON.

“I fucking hate you,” he told himself, and threw his keys back into the bowl. He could do this. It wasn’t a big deal. She was just his ex-girlfriend. She’d loved him, once. She’d always been clear-headed and kind to him, even at his worst. She was a good person. A great person, even. The best person he’d ever known.

He slumped back on the couch, pulled out his phone, and hit Message.

 

* * *

 

He bought himself a hot chocolate at Starbucks and took a seat at a table near the door, so she’d see him. He’d cut caffeine out, too, because he never half-assed anything. Aside from a two-week-long headache, the downside to quitting caffeine and alcohol together was that it eliminated nearly all of the social spaces he could inhabit. Even coffee shops made him uncomfortable.

As he waited, he checked his phone impulsively, and wondered if it was an addiction too, if he’d ever be able to eliminate all reliance on external things, even if they did seem innocuous or socially acceptable. She hadn’t replied to him after he confirmed plans with her. His _I’ll see you then_ hung seen at 8:22pm two days ago. Since then, he’d barely been able to sleep or eat, his mind affixed on all the things he wanted to say, all the things she might reply. It’d been a decade since he’d seen her last. Back then, he thought they were adults, twenty-two, but over the long span of their courtship, they’d stripped each other of growth, stagnated emotionally at sixteen by burying their potential into their relationship. He fucked up a lot of things, but he still conceded that what they had was complicated, and even now, he couldn’t understand it. No one had since come close to what he and Clarke had.

When she arrived, she didn’t see him right away. He was grateful for it; it gave him the opportunity to look at her. He thought he’d been nervous before, but now his heart was pounding and he had trouble breathing. Once, she’d felt like an extension of him. He knew her body as well as his own. He could think through her mind. Now she was a stranger, standing a few feet away, looking down at her phone. Her hair was short, cropped at her chin. She was wearing a floral blouse and leggings, a scarf, flats. Just a little bit of makeup. Her acne had cleared up, but otherwise she looked nearly the same, except for simply, older. No physical trait that could be discerned, but she was no longer somebody you’d card at a bar. She held herself differently, confident, at ease.

Only when she ordered her coffee — drip, black, that was new — did she look around. She didn’t smile when she spotted him, vacant but for a spark of recognition. On one hand it was a relief, that she wasn’t going to treat this as a friendly, polite affair. Fake. On the other, it terrified him. This was a person he had hurt, a person who by all means should have seen his message and promptly blocked him, who should have called the cops on him at one point and taken him to court, who should have dragged him to rehab or a psych unit on countless occasions. But her biggest mistake was that she’d always believed in him, always loved him for the man he could have been, not the man he was. The fact she was here, taking a seat across from him, told him that she still had hope.

“Hi,” she said, dropping her purse by her feet. Now she was smiling, not happily but shyly. She had a tinge of red in her cheeks.

“Hey.” He sat on his hands. He should have stood up to hug her, or greet her in some other way than by staring at her dumbly. The last time he’d seen her, she didn’t even say goodbye. She said, “See you later,” and handed him her keys. Then she kissed him, an easy, sweet kiss. They continued texting for a while after that, out of habit mostly, until she stopped sharing pieces of her life with him, and eventually quit replying entirely. Later, she unfriended him on Facebook, and later, he realized her replies had only ever been a courtesy, not to leave him drifting after she’d clearly moved on.

“How are you?” He shoved down a grimace at his own stupid question, platitudes when he should be on his knees, or in a cell, or dead.

“Good,” she said. “You?”

“Kind of a loaded question.”

She lifted her eyebrows at him, amused seemingly by the fact he, Bellamy Blake, renowned partier, larger than life, a man who had once punched a police officer in the face, could not pick up his hot chocolate for fear of spilling it over his trembling hand.

“What do you do now?” she asked casually, taking a sip of coffee and politely not calling out what a wreck he was, what she surely knew the truth of this meeting to be. He never deserved her compassion then, and he certainly didn’t now.

“Freelancing. Front-end development stuff.”

He couldn’t meet her eyes to tell if she was impressed by that. Not that she should be, that he possessed a basic marketable skill, and was capable of living on his own and supporting himself. It was the bare minimum of existence, nothing to be proud of.

“Did you ever — ?”

“No,” he said quickly. Go back to school, she was about to say. He’d always had a knack for technology, had once built himself a PC out of used parts he found at garage sales, so he was a computer science major for a short while, and after he dropped out, kept with it because it was the only piece of identity he had left. Computer nerd. Gamer.

“Self-taught,” he said. “There’s tutorials for everything now. You?”

“Pediatrician.”

He ran his hand through his hair. He didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as her. Then again, that was the line of thinking that got him into this mess. He rooted around in his brain for an affirmation, but none came.

“Are you happy?” he asked. He meant with her choice of career, which she’d been somewhat strong-armed into by her mother, but also generally.

“I am,” she said, but he couldn’t tell if it was another platitude. If the things he’d said and done still haunted her, kept her from love and trust and intimacy. Maybe he was inflating his own importance in her life by thinking that, underestimating her ability to heal. “Are you?”

“No.”

He tugged at the cardboard corner of his coffee sleeve, could feel her eyes on him, assessing him in her enormous, brilliant mind, which had always made him feel ten inches tall, even when she was the one constantly seeking his reassurance and validation. It had made him feel powerful once, to be seen by someone like her, to bring her down to his level so she would never know the sick truth: she was too good for him. She’d always been too good for him.

“I’m in a program now,” he said. Miller had been so easy. Bellamy told him things sucked and now he knew better, and nothing like it would ever happen again. Miller forgave him and that was that. They’d probably never be friends again — Bellamy didn’t have friends anymore, for their sake — but at least they could be on good terms.

“A program,” Clarke repeated. Her face was impossible to read, curious or critical or proud, he had no idea. He wanted to puke.

“With twelve steps.” He pulled the corner, hard, and the sleeve came apart and fell off the cup. It didn’t matter. His hot chocolate had gotten cold. “I’m on nine. Making amends.”

“How long have you been sober?”

Three years, two months, eleven days.

“Three years.”

“Wow.”

He started drinking when he was nineteen. He had a problem by twenty-one, but he didn’t know it at the time. He considered himself a social drinker, evenings and weekends. They lived on campus. There were parties every night, and everyone knew Bellamy brought the fun. When Clarke began worrying about him, he tried to quit but only switched to weed and benzos. Then his mom died, and things got bad, then worse, and Clarke broke up with him. He started drinking again. He was a blackout drunk; the memory of his young adulthood was peppered with wide blank spots. Years of his life looked like swiss cheese. He hit rock bottom at twenty-six, when he lost his job and ran out of money and robbed a liquor store, which he had no recollection of. He spent thirty days in jail and got shuffled into rehab. When he got out, he told himself moderation was key, that sobriety would never work for him. A few more years of slipping slowly toward rock bottom again, and he finally decided sobriety was the only answer, the only way out. The second round of rehab caught, and he’d been sober ever since.

“I have to keep at it,” he said. “I can’t give up on myself.”

She smiled, a real one this time, not with her mouth, but in her eyes, and quickly schooled her features back to skepticism. He felt the small surge of adrenaline he used to get when he did something to earn her happiness, her praise. Clarke’s smile was his first addiction.

“I acknowledge,” he continued, his tone measured, his speech rehearsed, “the things I did to you were horrible. Inhumane.”

She averted her gaze, then, and he saw fear flicker across her face. He hated that he’d ever put that look on her. Even now, just admitting the things he’d done was enough to bring it back.

“Please, I’m. I was sick. That doesn’t excuse it, but.” He was going off script. Next he was supposed to pull out his list, everything he could remember that he’d done to her, which was agony to write, but he couldn’t do that if it would hurt her. That was one of the rules. “I’m on medication. I went to rehab, twice. I have a therapist. I go to two AA meetings a week.”

Her eyes darted to the exits, to the people nearby. Two women were sitting beside them, college students probably, textbooks open between them. He’d chosen the busiest Starbucks in town for that purpose, so she wouldn’t feel cornered.

“Okay, good for you,” she said. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to know, nothing that happened between us was your fault. You were good to me, and I hurt you. A lot.”

When he’d rehearsed it in his head, this was the point she started crying. Back when, she cried on a dime. A commercial with a dog in it, all Disney movies, a stray thought that caught her the wrong way. She held her emotions close to the surface. She’d been trained out of expressing them, though, forced into complacency. Covered her laughter with her hand. Apologized for being too loud. Always trying to make herself small, take up as little space as possible. He made that worse, he knew he did. He admired it about her, in their early days, that she could feel so openly. That she had emotions at all to hide, when he barely had any, except for anger, which felt most days like something separate from him, something he carried around that he could never get rid of.

Now, she didn’t cry, or make any expression at all.She was thinking, he could see that much.

“Thank you,” she said. “I know it, but. I appreciate that. That you know it too.”

The barista called the name of the next coffee order. Double-shot latte, extra foam. A line had piled up at the cash register, and a gust of cold wind hit them whenever the door opened. On the speakers, 90s R&B was playing.

“I don’t think I deserve your forgiveness,” he said, “but I’m asking for it anyway.”

“Don’t try to make me feel guilty.”

“I’m not. I’m really —” He took a breath. “I can handle the things I’ve done to myself. The ways I’ve destroyed my own life. And I’ve made a lot of progress. I’m proud of that progress. But this is the hardest thing I — For a long time, I ignored it all. Someone else did those things, not me. And then, after rehab, suddenly I could remember all these things I’d forgotten, see them with new eyes. It was me who did all of that, and I have to face that whatever is in me that made me capable of those things, it’s still there. And I don’t know how to get rid of it, so I can only manage it.”

“I feel like you’re trying to manipulate me into feeling sorry for you.”

 _I’m not,_ he almost said, throwing up a wall of defense. “I understand,” he said instead. “But I can’t be responsible for your emotions. I’m telling you my truth, and however you choose to feel is up to you. I’m not trying to get anything out of you. I’m trying to make amends, and move on.”

She leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and appraised him. Now that it was all out, he could relax a little. He was still shaking; he always shook now, and probably always would, but his heart had fallen into its usual rhythm. The coffee shop felt hyperreal, lights too bright, colors all blinding, noise too loud. He couldn’t choose what to focus on.

“I don’t forgive you,” she said finally.

“Okay,” he said with a nod. “Thank you for your time, though. I appreciate you coming to see me.”

He moved to get up, but she added, “I hate this. This version of you. It’s an act. It’s not real. You sound like you’ve been brainwashed.”

This was exactly the kind of thinking that led him to just one more beer. AA was creepy and strange, like a cult, and sobriety wasn’t real, wasn’t something he should ask himself to attain in a modern world, where everything revolved around stimulating or numbing yourself.

He thumbed the 3-year chip in his pocket. He was pathetic. One day Octavia would find him dead in his apartment, a not-so-accidental overdose. The world had always been too much for him, and he always seemed to hurt more than other people hurt. He knew even as a child he wouldn’t make it long-term, knew that life would bear down on him until he shattered.

“If there’s something I can do to earn your forgiveness,” he said, “I’ll do it. If not, then I’ll leave you alone.”

It took all of his willpower not to crumble under her gaze, do something embarrassing like cry or beg, or get up and leave, or, god forbid, start yelling. Make a scene. That was probably what she was most afraid of. They’d been kicked out of so many restaurants and bars and, one time, putt-putt golf. He felt like she was testing him, to see what he’d do when pushed. She always liked to push him.

“I want this to be real,” she said, her face softening. “I want you to be the person you are underneath all that rage and sadness. All I ever wanted was for you to stop suffering.”

“I think I can be that person. Eventually.”

“Do you have anyone to help you? Friends, family? A girlfriend?”

He shook his head, could hardly bear to admit the truth. “No. No one except my sponsor and counselor.”

She held her hand out. “Give me your phone.”

He unlocked it and put it in her hand, no case, shattered screen. She clicked around and handed it back to him. _Clarke Griffin,_ the entry said, and below it, her new number. Some spark of excitement rose in him, that she still had her last name, that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He quickly tamped it down. He wasn’t about to get a crush on his ex-girlfriend.

“I want to be friends,” she said. “I wanted to reach out so many times, see how you were doing. But I knew I’d fall into your —” She made a swirling gesture with her hand. “Aura. Get swept up in you again. If you’ve changed though, if you’ve really changed, I want to know the new you.”

He swallowed. It hurt. Pressure gathered behind his eyes and he had to laugh to dispel it. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Let’s go out to dinner. Get caught up.”

This conversation didn’t go at all like he’d planned. He thought he would start on his list and she would throw her coffee in his face and leave. He never imagined that she’d want to stay in touch.

“I’d like that,” he said.

She stood and shouldered her bag. “Text me later, okay?”

“Sure.”

But she didn’t move to leave, and he realized she was waiting for a hug. It’d been months since he touched another person. He stood and hugged her, and she held him for just a moment too long. He smelled her hair. Lavender. She felt small and soft in his arms, and he was transported ten years back, hugging his girlfriend goodbye after a quick lunch between classes, and he almost broke, then, but managed to keep his composure long enough to tell her goodbye and watch her walk out the door. He followed soon after, and made it to his car and cried — relief, joy, sorrow, shame. This was by far the worst side effect of sobriety and antidepressants, a full and unrelenting spectrum of emotion. It was like quitting smoking, and suddenly you could smell again. He punched his steering wheel until his hand went numb, and when he could finally take a breath, he turned the ignition.

 

* * *

 

He waited a day to text her. _Thank you again for meeting me yesterday. I had a good time._

It was a bad idea to do it in the afternoon. Only after he sent it did he realize she probably worked a regular schedule. She didn’t get back to him until seven.

_I did too!_

He had no idea what to reply, but before he could, she added, _It was great seeing you again,_ with a blushy smile emoji.

He wasn’t sure of the sincerity of the message. She was unerringly polite. When she was a kid, her mother had made her read etiquette books. She went to finishing school, even, though that wasn’t what they called it. It had been posed as a summer camp. It took years for her to loosen up. He considered it his personal objective at first, to get this shy, strict girl to unleash herself. He could see it simmering under her skin, loved her for the wild person she was beneath all her careful posturing.

They were in the same grade. He changed schools in seventh, when his dad split and his mom took him and Octavia to a new town to live with their aunt. At his old school, he’d been shy and quiet, the weird kid, mercilessly bullied. At his new school, he decided he wouldn’t let that happen. He hit his growth spurt sooner than the other boys. He was feared and revered, the bully of bullies. He made sure nobody got picked on. Clarke sat in front of him in English class, and rose her hand to answer every question, sat in her chair like she had a yardstick attached to her spine. She didn’t notice him at all, until biology, when they were partnered together to dissect frogs. He didn’t want to do it. She called him a baby and did all the gross work while he filled out the worksheets. They were friends, kind of, as much as two people in opposite social circles could be in middle school. At least, he thought they were, but years later, she told him she hadn’t liked him at all, but she never knew why, until high school, when she figured out she had a crush on him.

He asked her to homecoming freshman year. He wore his dad’s leather jacket. He smoked in the boy’s bathroom, had detention every Saturday, never got higher than a C, a stereotype of the boy he wanted to be, the boy a princess like Clarke should have nothing to do with. The performance was so apparent that they went as Sandy and Danny from _Grease_ for Halloween.

They didn’t have cell phones back then, so he called her house every night after school, and her housekeeper always answered. He learned quickly that Clarke didn’t get along with her mom, and was held to unreasonably high standards, and had far too much responsibility for someone her age, like him. She was quiet at first, but he found that with the right question, he could get her talking. She was the first person he’d ever met who could actually listen for the sake of listening, not just for her turn to speak. He felt seen by her in a way no one had ever seen him before. She thought he was smart. She laughed at his jokes. To his surprise, she flirted with him, and somehow, he knew how to flirt back. It felt like they were the only real people in the world, and everyone else was background noise. Falling in love with Clarke Griffin was the easiest thing he’d ever done.

 _You too,_ he replied, grimacing, then decided to dive right in. _When are you free for dinner?_

He watched the ellipses rise and fall, and fell himself into a little spiral. She probably changed her mind about him, realized how ridiculous it was, to allow someone like him into her life again. A known addict and abuser, who had claimed to change dozens of times before and never really had. Everything he used to be pivoted on finding an escape, but until recently, he never knew what he’d been escaping. His relationship with Clarke had offered both of them a release of the burden of being an entire person. Together they only had to be one half of a greater whole.

 _I work M through F,_ she said. _And next weekend I’m busy. Weekend after? Saturday?_

She was probably too busy to be anything more than acquaintances with him. He would be happy just being on good terms with her anyway, but — he didn’t realize until this moment how much he’d been looking forward to seeing her again, the thought of getting back a little of what they’d once valued in one another. No one told him friendships were so hard as an adult. As a healthy, well-adjusted person they were difficult enough. As a toxic person, when most of his peers had learned to steer clear of people like him — had, in fact, already been burned repeatedly by people like him — they were impossible.

 _That works,_ he replied.

 _Sounds great!_ A series of celebratory emojis followed. He replied with a thumbs-up emoji, and continued staring at the screen long after. She had her read receipts on, and it showed that she’d seen the message. He hoped maybe she’d ask him how he was doing, some opening that would allow him to continue the conversation, to show her he was a diligent texter now. Despite his skill with computers, smart phones and texting took him years to pick up. Social media, longer. They were one of those couples that had a shared Facebook account, back when people did that kind of thing. Only Clarke posted to it, but she used the royal We in all her status updates. Their friends got tired of referring to them as “Clarke and Bellamy” so they went by a portmanteau of their names, Blarke. They shared everything. Every picture, every outing, every minute of every day outside of class, together.

Days passed and he didn’t hear from her again, though several times he considered texting her to say hello, but he didn’t want to seem clingy. He imagined she had a flourishing social life. Maybe a significant other. It seemed too soon to ask. He wondered if she had any idea how much her friendship meant to him, if she was thinking about him as much as he was thinking about her, or if coffee with him had only been one weird errand in a long day.

His daily routine kept him out of trouble. He woke up at six in the morning and went to the gym. He came home, ate breakfast, showered, and watched the news. Then he went to the library and sat in his car waiting for it to open. Sinclair was the first shift librarian, and greeted him every morning. Bellamy had begun buying him a coffee from the shop across the street, where he sometimes bought himself a decaf, or juice. He set up at his favorite table in the corner, where nobody could see him, but he could stare out the window at the main road and watch cars pass. There was an outlet here. He could work in peace, with headphones on, only occasionally interrupted by Sinclair, who sometimes wanted to show him things, science articles he’d read, mostly, a strange rapport they’d developed from Bellamy asking one question one time about a book on quantum mechanics. Bellamy appreciated the company, even if he was technically on the clock.

At noon, he went to lunch at a Hungarian restaurant disguised as an American diner, and which had a regular diner menu, except the daily special, which was always Hungarian, and which Bellamy always ordered. He sat at the bar and watched TV as he ate his giant plate of something he couldn’t remember the name of, but was always amazing.

He returned home by one, and tidied his apartment, and settled in to read a book or play whatever game he was into until dinner. On Mondays and Thursdays, he went to AA, which was held in a Methodist church down the street from seven to nine p.m. Every other Wednesday afternoon, he had therapy. All other nights, he worked on his steps, making lists, meditating, trying to come to terms with himself and all his wrongdoings. Then he fell asleep in front of the TV by ten.

He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket in AA on Thursday night, assumed it was a weather alert, though the sky had been clear when he arrived. No one ever texted him. When AA finished, he checked his phone to find a text from Clarke. He stared at her name, getting that feeling again like when he’d hugged her, traveling in time. He let himself indulge in the fantasy, that behind the alert was a question, _What do u want for dinner,_ and he would tell her he didn’t care, and they’d go back and forth like that until he got home, and their bickering would have turned her on, and they’d end up fucking on the living room floor, and after, ordering pizza.

 _I was looking thru my old photo albums,_ she said. _Remember this?_ The picture that followed was one from a dance, junior year prom, maybe. Or sophomore turnabout. He was standing behind her in the basic prom-photo pose, smiling widely while she smiled modestly. His suit was grey; her dress was blue. His tie matched her dress. Her corsage matched her dress. He was rail-thin, just a twig, and so was she. When he’d seen her a few days ago, she’d been wearing a loose-fitting top, but she did seem curvier. Her tits were hard to miss, even though he wasn’t that kind of guy anymore, who looked at women’s chests when they weren’t looking. He wondered how he seemed in her eyes; he knew he looked much older than his age. He had wrinkles when he shouldn’t yet, shadows under his eyes, a slight peppering of grey in his hair.

He sat on the church steps and stared at the photo. Despite his rejection of high school traditions, he recognized how important they were for Clarke, how much she looked forward to them and meticulously planned every detail of every dance and football game and yearbook, so he made an effort to be excited with her, and he was glad, later, he’d conceded to that excitement. High school would have looked a lot different without Clarke, a lot darker. With her, he had a dedicated group of friends and plans every weekend. But they’d always been _her_ friends, and he was always just Clarke’s boyfriend, never Bellamy. He didn’t build relationships with any of them. They never invited him to hang out solo. When he and Clarke broke up, he lost his entire social net, and never found another.

 _Wow,_ he replied. _We were babies._

_The baby-est! Idk what happened to that dress. I wouldn’t fit into it anymore._

_I definitely wouldn’t fit into that suit,_ though he did still have it for some reason. It was at the back of his closet.

 _You were so skinny! I prefer beefy Bellamy,_ and a wink emoji.

He nearly dropped his phone. A few late stragglers left the church and said goodbye to him, and he waved as they passed, and when he looked down at his phone again, he was sure the words would have changed, that he misconstrued them, but nope, the little yellow wink still stared at him invitingly. Old Bellamy would have jumped the gun, replied with something awkward and tactless. Maybe she knew that. Maybe it was another test. It didn’t mean anything.

 _Thanks,_ he said with the blush emoji. _I go to the gym._

_I can tell!!_

He wanted to tell her she looked good too, but she had to know. She wasn’t a kid anymore, didn’t need the constant “you’re beautiful”s and “so fucking sexy”s he used to drown her with. Her mother had started her on diets at seven years old, carefully moderated her food intake her entire life, commented disparagingly on her body at every opportunity. Clarke had an eating disorder by high school. It was their first real drama, the day she ended up in the hospital the beginning of sophomore year. She had collapsed in art class, hadn’t eaten anything of substance in days. He didn’t know her well, then, even though they’d been dating nearly a year, a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. He didn’t know shit about eating disorders. He thought she was just a picky eater. He found out through the grapevine what had happened, left school without being dismissed, and sped to the hospital.

He went into the ER totally beside himself, snapping at the front-desk nurse, who wouldn’t let him see her, until finally Abby arrived and said it was okay and they both went back together. Clarke was all hooked up, barely conscious. Bellamy started crying and Abby told him to get himself together, told both of them to stop being so dramatic. In retrospect, underneath her aloof facade, she’d been terrified. After, she took Clarke to a nutritionist and therapist, and never made another negative comment about her daughter’s body again. Bellamy, too, made it his mission for Clarke to feel beautiful all the time, communicate his attraction to her in any way he could. Now, despite his good intentions, even that seemed toxic. She shouldn’t have had to care what he thought of her appearance. He certainly never cared what she thought of his.

The collapse had been the inciting moment of his control issues, his constant worrying. He couldn’t trust her to prioritize her own health, so he did it for her. He asked her at the end of every day what she had eaten. She ate well for him, because she knew he would ask. It was easy, later, to transfer that practice to other things, what she did every day, who she saw, what grades she got. He discouraged her from hanging out with Jasper and Monty, renowned stoners, bad influences, which was maybe the most hypocritical belief he’d ever held. He thought Abby was abusive, which was also hypocritical, and asked that Clarke call him after every interaction, so he could make sure she was okay, not slipping back into bad habits. When she did something good, he was proud of her; bad, he was disappointed. Later, after Aurora died, disappointment turned to anger. Clarke was so eager to appease him, to follow his rules. He thought he was taking care of her. He thought he was saving her from herself.

 _Any other gems?_ he texted. She didn’t reply right away, so he drove home, and when his phone went off a block away from his apartment, he checked it despite the danger in doing so. It was almost as if he had impulse control issues. She sent him a picture Raven had taken at one of their secret sleepovers. The two of them were in a tent in the backyard, Bellamy shirtless, Clarke clearly undressed under a blanket, both of them looking agitated at being interrupted. It was possible Bellamy was inside her even as the picture was taken. They’d had so many secret sleepovers, his memories skipped over each other and bled together. All he could remember was his inability to keep his hands off her, having sex at every opportunity — in Raven’s bathroom, her closet, under blankets in a room full of people, the pool. He wanted to be inside Clarke every minute of every day. It was the only time he felt whole.

He parked his car at his apartment and replied, _Were we…?_

_Yep!!!_

He felt guilty for the high he was getting from this. His ex-girlfriend told him he was hot and then sent him a picture of them fucking. It was the most exciting thing to happen to him in years.

 _Going right for the gold huh,_ he said.

_Don’t tell me you’ve gotten shy._

_Oh I’m not shy princess._

_Good. I’d hate to have to break you out of your shell._

Sirens were going off in his head. If this was a test, he was surely failing. Princess. It had just slipped out, natural as the first time he said it and the million times after. He needed to step more carefully. They were basically strangers.

She continued texting him throughout the night, trading pictures and memories. Flirting lightly. Teasing him. They were up late, until two in the morning, before he finally fell asleep on his couch waiting for her to reply, but she didn’t, had obviously fallen asleep too, his last message a question — _What is Jasper up to these days?_ — and he woke up to _Seen 6:30am_ which warmed him a little. He imagined her turning off her alarm, checking his final text before hitting snooze.

He made it to the library a little past ten, and Sinclair, who was helping a patron, gave him a look like, _Bro, where have you been?_ and Bellamy shrugged. He felt light, could hardly concentrate on his work. He listened to music he used to listen to with Clarke, early 2000s alternative indie, Death Cab, Bright Eyes, Broken Social Scene, and thought about the drives they used to go on out in the country, no destination in mind, holding hands and listening to her sing, falling more deeply in love every minute. They’d pull off somewhere dark and isolated, and she’d crawl over his lap, wearing a skirt with no underwear, tank top with no bra, already wet in anticipation. He knew her body so well, could string her orgasm along as long as he wanted, until she was begging him to let her go. He liked keeping her right at the edge, liked it when she came so hard she screamed and he’d have to clap his hand over her mouth so no one would call the cops. He was never able to find that kind of sexual chemistry with anyone else, maybe because what he and Clarke had was really that special, or the novelty of teenagehood faded into the banality of adulthood. Or maybe he was just too fucking drunk to enjoy it anymore.

He checked his phone throughout the day, every few seconds even though he had it set to loud. The Clarke he used to know would have prioritized texting him back over anything. In college she texted him all day every day, in class, the bathroom, driving, hanging out with friends. He didn’t demand it of her; by then, it was routine. Most of the time they weren’t even saying anything to each other, just a running commentary of the things that happened, as if, together, they were living one life. If she dropped the ball, she would apologize, and he would tell her it was okay but secretly be irritated. He should have encouraged her to be her own person, but that would have required him to be his own person too, and that wasn’t possible. Part of him now was glad she didn’t reply, that they didn’t fall immediately into old habits. His aura, she called it. He knew he was a black hole, and she was a sun that threatened to be extinguished in him.

 _He’s a preschool teacher!!_ she replied much later, after he’d eaten dinner. He braced himself for the apology of taking so long to reply. None came, to his relief. He wanted to take time to reply back, not seem so eager, but he couldn’t help himself.

 _That’s great._ And then, _I hope you had a good day._ Not asking outright, but offering an opening in case she wanted to share. She didn’t have to. He wouldn’t be upset if she didn’t. The ellipses rose, and he watched them in anticipation, going and going, typing a novel. They disappeared, and didn’t reappear for nearly a minute.

 _It was fine,_ she said with a smiley. _Yours?_

 _Good,_ he said simply, and wanted to tell her he got a new client, would be able to pay rent another month. He wanted to say that Fridays were the worst for him, the night he used to go to on a bender from seven in the evening all the way through Sunday, and for years, was so proud of himself for only being a weekend drinker. The nightly six-pack didn’t count. The two fingers of whiskey to help him sleep didn’t count, either.

But Clarke’s job wasn’t to shoulder his problems, and even if she offered, he wouldn’t. He knew better. He had a therapist for all that. He could take a turn to speak in AA. Clarke was a friend now, and friends were for companionship. Eventually they might get to a point where they could become familiar with each other’s present lives, but that time wasn’t now. He also didn’t want to be one of those guys who couldn’t carry a conversation over text, who made women do seventy-five percent of the work of friendship.

 _What about Monty?_ he asked, and the conversation continued as easily as it had the night before, except it paused at midnight, again on a question, marked read at nine in the morning, and she replied this time at two in the afternoon. It went on like that, day after day, a few hours every evening, except the nights he had AA, where he left her on read to give her space, and she didn’t seem to mind. They made sure always to end on a thread that could be easily picked up the next day, so the conversation could continue without either of them having to forcibly re-initiate it. He asked her every night how her day had been. She didn’t give any information, just a bland _Fine_ or _Good,_ and he offered the same, a perpetual olive branch to make sure she knew his willingness to know, to be close again only if she wanted and in the ways she wanted, and he didn’t want to ask anything more of her.

Mostly they reminisced about the past, traveled through memories together, only the good ones, of which there were many. It had been unhealthy the whole time, but only got bad, really bad, at the end, the final year, after Aurora died and Bellamy couldn’t cope, when he turned from an overprotective boyfriend who meant well, who could have learned and grown, into an abuser and alcoholic, the kind of person you had to go to therapy for having known, that made you ask yourself, how did I not see this coming? How could I have prevented it? And you begin, day after day, year after year, to pick out the signs in others. You ask yourself when you meet someone new, what is this person capable of? What could set them off? In a sense, he’d betrayed himself also; in not knowing what he was capable of until the final straw with Clarke, the moment that changed his life, he could no longer trust anyone else, either.

On Friday evening, she texted, _So what’s the plan?_

They hadn’t talked about hanging out since those initial texts what felt like forever ago. Time moved much more slowly now, counting the days of sobriety, every day the stakes rising, the climb so much harder knowing the fall would always be swift and easy. As much as talking to Clarke oiled the rusty gears of his days, he still checked the fridge for beer that wasn’t there, still sometimes drove to his favorite bar and sat in the parking lot. He’d only called Pike once since talking to Clarke again. Pike talked him down, reminded him to give himself up to a higher power, which to Bellamy was his mother, and all the things she represented to him — love, loyalty, courage, acceptance, the values she had raised him with, the traits he saw in his ideal self. He couldn’t get on board with God, but he could be good for his mother.

 _I was thinking lunch if that’s okay,_ he said. And to clarify, _Less alcohol over lunch._ As soon as he sent it he felt stupid and weak. He didn’t want to get in a situation where Clarke ordered a glass of wine with dinner, and Bellamy ordered one too, either unthinking or convincing himself it wasn’t a big deal. Soup and sandwiches were the safer bet.

He suggested his Hungarian-American diner and she sent heart eyes in return. They agreed to meet at noon. For the first time in over a week, the conversation ended, and he was fine with it. He went to the gym that evening to blow off some steam, tire himself out, and fell asleep by nine.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See specific warnings in end note.
> 
> (How the end note warning works: if you are a person who likes to be warned in specifics rather than tags, click "see end note" below and read the warnings prior to the start of the chapter. Note also that the warnings contain spoilers.)

Bellamy arrived to lunch fifteen minutes early. His favorite server, Ilian, was pleased to see him on a Saturday, and asked why he was sitting at a booth instead of the bar. Bellamy told him he was waiting on someone. The place was mostly empty, so Ilian brought Bellamy his Sprite and hung around to chat. They were talking about the weather, how unseasonably beautiful it was today, and how they were waiting for a final cold snap before spring would arrive, when Clarke came in. She was dressed down, a t-shirt and jeans. No makeup or jewelry. He was knocked sideways by her, that someone like her could even exist. When they were teenagers, he used to get high and think she was an angel. He’d go down on her and consider it worship. Her presence always made him go a little stupid. 

She took a seat across from him, ordered a coffee, and Ilian left to get it.

“This place doesn’t look Hungarian,” she said, taking off her scarf as she stared at the giant American flag across the far wall. A cartoon picture of pancakes decorated the front of the menu, with a cowboy pouring syrup over them. 

“It’s secretly Hungarian.”

“And you’re a regular?”

“You could say that.”

Ilian returned with with a carafe and filled Clarke’s mug. “You want the special,” he said to Bellamy, and to Clarke, “You?”

“I’ll also have the special,” she said. 

“Good choice.”

When he was out of earshot, Clarke asked, “What’s the special?” and glanced around for some sign or bulletin board that would list it.

“I never know, but it’s always good.”

“Wild card diner. I like it.”

She took the place in, its rustic sixties vibe, formica tables and vinyl booths, wicker chairs, oak wood paneling. He wasn’t sure what to say. Before, at coffee, it had all been meticulously planned. Now he was flying blind. He didn’t know who he was anymore around other people. Old Bellamy was an extrovert, charming yet overbearing, steered the conversation easily wherever he wanted it to go. He talked over people, interrupted them. He was a bad listener. Never held an ounce of social anxiety, probably because he didn’t know how to be considerate of other people, or read a room. Until rehab, he had no idea how to see himself from anyone else’s perspective.

“Did you find the place okay?” he asked.

“Hard to miss.”

The diner was in the middle of nowhere, the only building in a solid square mile, tucked between trees. It was near the intersection of two major truck routes, so it was something of a watering hole among cross-country truckers.

“When did you start coming here?” she asked.

He was grateful for an easy opening, told her he used to go on midnight drives when he couldn’t sleep, and came upon it that way, which wasn’t too far from the truth, that the diner was on the way to his old dealer, back when he had a bit of a nasal problem, again to help curb his drinking, which was idiotic logic, and, due to cost and overall unpleasantness, didn’t last long. 

In turn, she told him about her office’s cafeteria, and the drama thereof, that they turned off the grill at two p.m. and some people didn’t get lunch until three. She waxed poetic about the fro-yo machine and toppings bar. Conversation moved easily after that. He asked questions, and she fell so animatedly into her stories that she didn’t notice when Ilian dropped off their food, what looked like half an entire chicken covered in gravy, and something mushy and yellow, potatoes maybe, and a basket of rolls. She continued talking while she ate, unabashedly, not even covering her mouth. It delighted him, this girl who used to harshly police every inch of her body now a woman who didn’t give a single fuck.

Her enthusiasm and openness, like it did when they first met, gave him the courage to pry a little more. “So,” he began, tearing a roll in half, “what have you been doing the past ten years?”

She downed her coffee and set it at the edge of the table for Ilian to refill. A decade ago, she wouldn’t have wanted to bother him.

“Not much.” She inspected the chicken for how best to tackle cutting it apart. “I’m divorced. I have a kid.”

He nearly choked on his Sprite.

“What?” she asked.

“I just. Wasn’t expecting that.”

“You think I was waiting around for you?”

“No. God, no. I, that’s major. A kid.”

“Her name is Madi. She’s five.” She clicked around on her phone and showed him a picture. Madi had black frizzy hair and bright eyes, three missing teeth. “She’s my li’l bean.”

He passed the phone back. “She looks just like you.”

“Her dad made you look like the Dalai Lama.”

It took him a second to parse what she meant, and even then it refused to land. “How is that possible?”

“With you, like. We had problems,” she said. “You had problems. But it was, I don’t know, a lot of emotional stuff, and it only got physical at the end. With him —” Her eyes went far away for a second, face fallen blank. “It was constant.” 

Of course there was a worse guy. There was always a worse guy. The truth struck him hard and mercilessly — what Bellamy had done to her had paved the path for what this guy did. Bellamy ruined her self-worth, her perception of acceptable behavior. Even if she didn’t see it that way, even if he asked and she denied it, he would know the reality: he had ground her into dust, and this other guy blew her into the wind.

“Madi was the result of what we’ll nicely call a non-consensual scenario,” she added, almost cheerily, like it was a joke. She switched gears once she saw his expression. “I’m sorry. I told myself I wouldn’t get into this. I can’t seem to shut up around you.”

Old Bellamy would have killed him, straight-up killed him, gone to prison for however long and never regretted a second of it. New Bellamy had to accept that justice wasn’t his job, and the only thing he had control over was himself. Sometimes he hated new Bellamy.

“Sorry,” she said again, and she was suddenly sixteen, shoulders hunched up like she was trying to hide in plain sight.

“No,” he said quickly, getting his thoughts in order. “I want you to tell me anything you’re comfortable telling me. But — I don’t want you to tell me what you’re not comfortable telling me. If that makes sense.” He pushed his plate away, appetite lost, not that he could have finished it anyway. “I guess, one of the benefits of so much group therapy and stuff is that you hear a lot of crazy shit. You watch people break down right in front of you, and you can’t do anything but witness it. I’m just trying to say, I won’t freak out if you tell me stuff.” Not like I did before, he wanted to add, when everything she did required an opinion from him, a reaction, a judgment. Good girl, bad girl, great job, try harder next time, you’re better than this. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

She breathed out a short laugh. “That’s freaking me out.”

“What?”

“Your script. The things you’ve been trained to say. It’s weird. It’s not you.”

He fiddled with his fork for something to do with his hands. “Half of recovery is education. It might be scripted but it’s still honest, like, ‘I’m sorry that happened to you’ is better than flipping a table and committing homicide.”

She ducked her head to hide her smile. As fucked-up as it seemed, she used to like how protective he was. “What’s the other half?”

“Acceptance.”

“Of what?”

“Yourself. That you’re just a small piece of something much bigger than yourself, and you have no control over any of it.”

Ilian came by and took their plates and asked how they wanted the check. Bellamy opened his mouth to say separately, but Clarke interjected. “Just one.” To Bellamy, she added, “I’ll get it.”

“You really don’t have to.”

She was smiling darkly at him, the look that used to mean she wanted to fuck or get into some trouble, or both. “You can get the next one.” 

The thought of a next one filled him with joy and terror. His goal had been to make amends with her, but it never occurred to him that those amends might come with friendship, that he might actually be able to redeem himself in her eyes. 

“There’s a park nearby,” she offered.

He knew that. They used to frequent the park for sex purposes. He got the distinct visual of pressing her against a tree and lifting her skirt. The filthy shit he used to whisper in her ear. She liked it rough, liked him mean. He wondered if she was remembering the same thing.

They left Bellamy’s car at the diner and Clarke drove them to the small parking lot at the foot of the walking trail.

It pained him to ask, but he had to. “You’re not afraid of me?”

She shut off the engine and took off her seat belt. “Should I be?”

“Is that a trick question?”

“Come on.” She opened the door. “You couldn’t kill me then and I doubt you could do it now.”

He got out of the car and jogged to catch up with her. She wasn’t wearing proper shoes for hiking, bright white Keds. While he was behind her he took a shameful glance at her ass, which filled out her tight jeans, high-waisted, a leather bomber jacket over top. It was difficult to look away. 

They walked in silence at an easy pace. A few of the trees had begun to bloom, bright green dots among the dreary wood, flashes of pink and purple and blue. It smelled like rain, earth. Clarke told him the story of Madi’s birth, which was a high-risk affair that involved being in the hospital for over a month, almost losing the baby, her husband somehow absent from the story. Bellamy asked more questions, said “wow” and “holy shit” and “oh my god” at what he felt were the appropriate times. 

He offered her a hand over a log. She held it for a long beat before letting him go. They were headed toward the cemetery, a ways off the paved trail, their special spot where they used to pretend they were the last people on earth. He didn’t know if he should mention it. Surely she remembered; she was the one guiding him. He pulled aside some branches and she stepped through, and there it was, just as they’d left it. Ancient grave markers peppered the grass, their words worn off, half sunk into the ground. It had probably been a family, they decided back-when, and this area had been a small town, which explained the cement monoliths, broken sign posts, small spots of abandoned life. The brush had encroached inward since they’d been here last, or maybe it was just smaller than he remembered. She climbed onto the ledge at the far side of the clearing and clapped her hands free of the dirt. He followed, just like they had dozens of times before. There was a chill in the air but her cheeks were flushed. 

“Was this intentional?” he asked, looking out over the river, high from recent rain. The ledge had probably once been a footbridge.

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“I didn’t bring us here.”

“I was following you.” She glanced at him, smiling. He kept her gaze for a long moment, watched her eyes flick down to his mouth. 

“I hate how good this feels,” she said. “Being around you.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“You have no idea.”

She looked away finally, down at her shoes, knocking her heels against the cement. They were covered in mud now. Her hands were balled in the pockets of her jacket. “I hated leaving you, you know.”

After the incident, she stayed with Abby, and two weeks later, he came home and found her on the couch, weeping inconsolably. It occurred to him much later that she had never gotten mad at him for what he did. If anything, she was upset he had put her in a position where she was basically forced to break up with him. It scared him to consider, that prior to what happened, she would have stayed with him for the rest of her life, just as he was. Despite it all, she let him hold her as she made her staggered way through her break-up speech. She said he had a bigger problem than either of them could handle or even understand, and that she wanted to support him through it, but not at the cost of her safety. He should have been sad or angry or anything other than what he was — empty. She left, and he didn’t up a fight; he finally understood his absence was the best thing, not just for her, but everyone in his life.

“You needed more help than I could offer,” Clarke said. “I never blamed you for what happened. I blamed myself for not being better for you. I regret it, especially now with Madi, and — this sounds horrible, but I see her and I think about how she could have been yours. I think about how much you’d love her. What a good dad you would have been if, if you managed to kick your problems.”

They’d talked about having kids. They had names picked out and everything, but Madi wasn’t one of them. Sometimes he thought they met at the wrong time. He wished they hadn’t made all their mistakes on each other, and he tried not to think about what it would be like if they’d met at their current ages, how easy it would be. Date for a year, maybe. A small wedding. A kid within the first couple years. 

“I never knew if I should blame you or the addiction,” she continued. “In my head, you and it were separate things. You were a good man with a bad problem. But I know I did the right thing, even if it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

A gust of cold wind blew in their direction. Clarke folded her arms over herself. The sun kept slipping out from behind the clouds, offering warmth for only minutes at a time. 

“I thought you would have grown to hate me by now,” he said.

“I can’t hate you. I told you I would never stop loving you. It’s still true.”

She loved him. She still loved him. Even if that love was in a small box locked away, never to be looked at again, it was there. Embers of a fire that could be stoked to life. He tried not to have hope.

She stared at his hands. “You shake now.”

“I know.”

“Is it all the time?”

He clasped his hands together so it would be less noticeable. “Yeah.”

She tugged at his wrist, and held his hand between both of her own. “You don’t have to hide from me. I want to understand who you are now.” 

He wouldn’t cry in front of her, but it was a near thing, her patient eyes, her loving touch. It was too much. 

“I’ve talked enough," she said. "Tell me about you.”

He told her everything he could remember, which wasn’t much. His memory was shit now, his mind of a fraction of the thing it used to be. He started with crashing Miller’s truck, which happened less than a month after Clarke stopped replying to his texts, and how he ended up in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder and an OVI, a thirty-day suspension on his license. He found Gina and then Echo, which he shamefully confused in his mind. Neither had been exclusive, so there was major overlap. They even looked kind of alike, and he never really got to know them. They used him for his body and he used them for their misplaced affection. He brought up Kane and the IT job he had for a while, three years, which paid well and came with benefits, way better than anything he deserved even if he was overqualified, and how he managed to fuck it all up. He couldn’t remember a single thing from 2011 through 2014. Then the liquor-store robbery, jail, his first stint in rehab. Things were okay for a while, but then he went to rehab again.

“If things were okay, what made you go back?” she asked.

“I was slipping back into old habits,” he said, “and I realized — managing isn’t the same as living. I’d clung onto this idea of moderation for so long. Sobriety wasn’t even an option. It was self-sabotage, like choosing to keep your arm broken. It didn’t make sense. Why  _ wouldn’t  _ I want to heal all the way, unless there was something else going on?” 

“Was there?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yeah, but it sounds stupid.”

“Tell me.”

Of its own volition, muscle memory deeper than his conscious mind could control, he laced his fingers between hers. Her hands were still as bony and small as they’d always been, a little cold, and his, too warm. “I didn’t know I should want to be alive. It’s one of those things that’s so obvious to other people, not even something you should have to think about. It was like I missed the day of kindergarten where we learned how to appreciate your own life. To love yourself.”

“Do you love yourself?”

“Not yet. But I’m starting to. I’m trying to.” He almost said something else, but stopped himself.

“What?”

He pulled his hand away. Her touch plus what he was about to say would break him. “My goal every day isn’t to avoid drinking. It’s to be kind to myself. It’s easier, thinking of it that way, because —” He paused, closed his eyes, and pretended he was at home working on his steps. “You taught me kindness. You taught me how people deserve to be treated.”

A bird flew off of a branch and rattled the entire tree. A large stick floated down the river. In the distance, the white noise of highway traffic. 

He risked a glance at her. She was wiping her eye with the side of her hand, and the tip of her nose was pink.

“What’s wrong?” he asked

“I’m scared,” she said. “I’m scared of how much hope I have.”

“I am too.”

They watched the river for a long time, until the sky darkened with rain clouds, and the temperature dipped lower. They made their way back to the car. 

“I told the sitter I didn’t know when I’d be home,” Clarke said. “But I also have some errands to run.”

“Okay.”

She looked nervous, which was kind of adorable. “I understand if you’re busy, but I figure, you know, if you want, we could run errands together, and maybe get another bite before my stagecoach turns into a pumpkin.” 

“First of all, let’s clear the misconception that I’m busy. I work twenty hours a week, max, and I have no friends.”

She stared at him, stunned. “I would murder for that schedule.”

“It’s not a glamorous life, but it’s also not a stressful one.”

First they went to the pharmacy, a small place owned and operated by one family. He wondered if they’d ever be able to avoid their memories. He used to buy condoms here, which had made him nervous considering how quickly gossip spread in this town, and how young they were when they started having sex, barely fifteen. Later, when Clarke got a prescription for birth control, they picked that up here too, after school. She took her pill every evening at six. They both had alarms set on their phones, and he would get her a glass of water and watch her take it. If they weren’t together, she would text him to let him know she’d done it. 

He walked down the candy aisle while she chatted up the pharmacist, a woman he didn’t recognize. He hadn't been here in years. Back then, to reward her for being diligent about her birth control, he let her pick out candy, whatever she wanted, and they’d eat it in the car on their way to Raven’s.

“Gonna buy me something?” she asked as she approached. It struck him, then, how some of the sickest things made the best memories. It had felt so intimate and strangely innocent to offer her little rewards for being good. She took so much satisfaction from his praise. 

“You’re still hungry?”

“I’m always hungry.”

“What do you want?”

She turned her attention to the candy. He knew what she would pick before she made it there, knock-off M&Ms from a local chocolatier, perfectly round rather than oblong, with a thicker candy shell that only came in yellow, green, and red. As far as he knew, you could only get them here. They’d probably bought hundreds of bags over the years.

She handed the bag of candy to him, standing too close, looking up at him with the same dark smile she’d given him at the diner. He didn’t know if it was a test, if he was supposed to tell her to buy her own candy, shut this whole operation down before it started. 

“Only if you want to,” she said.

“You know I want to.”

“And I want you to. We can indulge a little, don’t you think?”

He didn’t miss her double entendre. They knew everything about each other, and nothing. She was part of him, and separate from him, and it was impossible to reconcile this woman, this stranger, doctor, divorcee with a kid, with his good girl. And yet here she was, asking him for candy like she’d done a hundred times before.

“That’s a dangerous line of thought for people like me,” he said. 

“It’s just candy.”

“Is it?”

“No,” she said, grinning now, the same wildness in her eyes that had made him fall in love with her, that made it hard not to fall in love again.

He took the candy. At the cash register, she put her hand on his lower back. It was more expensive now, used to be ninety-nine cents but now it was a dollar fifty. Bellamy paid with two bills and told the cashier to keep the change. In the car, she dropped her pills in the back seat and opened the chocolate. “Can you still do it?”

“Don’t put me on the spot like this.”

“You have one talent. I want to see it.”

He glared at her. “You’re pushing me, princess.”

“You like being pushed.”

She tossed a piece of candy up. He caught it in his mouth. She cheered. “Again,” she said, and threw another. The third time, he missed, caught it in his hand and clapped it to his mouth. 

“I can’t do the whole bag,” he said. “I’m not a dolphin.”

“It’s so fun. I haven’t had fun in forever.” She wrinkled her nose. “Being a grown-up sucks.”

He took the bag from her so she would stop. “So let’s finish your errands and go have fun.”

Next was the grocery store, Whole Foods, and he made fun of her for being one of  _ those  _ moms, too good for their shitty local market where all the produce was rotten and the milk expired, which she pointed out to him, and he said, “It’s quaint. You don’t see small-town markets anymore. It’s all conglomerate bullshit.”

“I’d like to keep the e. coli outbreaks in my life to a minimum, thanks.”

Abby never liked that they moved in together right after high school, so Clarke was cut off financially as punishment. She worked at an ice cream shop part-time and had college paid for with scholarships. Bellamy did handyman work between classes and a few other odd jobs. They lived on dollar packets of cheesy rice, frozen chicken, peanut butter sandwiches. Occasionally they splurged on tubs of chocolate chip cookie dough, which she insisted they bake so as not to get salmonella, but he snuck spoonfuls when she wasn’t looking. She brought home ice cream for dinner some nights. They went grocery shopping every Thursday at midnight. She liked to climb into the cart and he ran her down the aisles, hopping up on the bar and colliding with shelves and displays. Sometimes, when the store was particularly empty, he pressed her against a freezer and slipped his hand into her pants, fingered her until she came, then casually tossed a box of frozen waffles into the cart. They had their own place, could walk around naked and have sex whenever and wherever they wanted, but after four years, they still couldn’t keep their hands off each other even long enough for a grocery run. 

Whole Foods was packed. Their cart was shitty and tiny. Clarke split her list in half and handed the bottom to him, and he zoomed around picking out weird organic kid food, apples and bananas (also organic), and eighteen-ply toilet paper threaded with gold. Tartar was on the list next, which was apparently different than tartar sauce, so he went from the condiment aisle to the herb aisle, and on the way got stopped by the liquor section. It felt like strangely like running into an old friend. He picked up a bottle of Merlot that was on sale and thought about how fun it would be to drink with Clarke. She was so cute when she was drunk. She got all red and handsy, extremely horny, and it was the only time she could ever match him in the arena of dirty talk. He was pretty sure if they drank together tonight, they would definitely fuck. At least make out.

“Bellamy,” she said, grabbing the wine bottle out of his hand and putting it back. “We’re not drinking.”

“I’m an alcoholic. It’s what I do.”

“Did.”

She pushed the cart toward the cash registers. He followed, feeling giddy, and it was his turn to put his hand on her back when they got in line. He leaned closer to her ear and said, “Remember when we…?”

She looked at him, faux-shocked, and shoved at his chest. “We are in public, Bellamy Blake.”

“That’s the fun of it.” He slipped underneath her jacket, where her shirt met the waistband of her jeans, and trailed his fingers across her skin. Her face turned blotchy pink, and goosebumps erupted over her back. She glanced at his mouth again.

“I do, though. Remember,” she said. “You’re impossible to forget.”

The person in front of them in line moved up, the conveyor belt emptied, and she started pulling items out of the cart. It was becoming increasingly difficult to keep his distance. She didn’t speak to the cashier except to say she’d found everything okay. Before, she was almost frighteningly friendly, pseudo-southern charm bred into her, but then shit-talked everyone as soon as they made it out the door. “That woman had makeup on her teeth,” she would say, or, “That dude had a unibrow. A wax is like, ten dollars. Come on,” as if it were every person’s natural obligation to be as committed to beauty as she was.

Bellamy helped bag the groceries into earth-friendly canvas totes. For a second he let himself believe this was their life, a regular couple doing their weekly shopping. Something so perfect in its normalcy that he would never think to be grateful for it. He might even be put off by how much they were spending, or he didn’t get the brand of chips he liked, or he wished he was home mowing the lawn or working on whatever hobbies someone his age should have.

Outside, Clarke hopped on the back of the cart and said, “Okay. Do the thing,” so he rushed her all the way down the parking lot, stared at by the rich people who were boring about their grocery-to-car methodology. She lifted her arms up Titanic-style, and gracefully hopped off the cart when he slowed. They unloaded the bags into the trunk, occasionally brushing against each other as they went. She shut it, and looked up at him in that way, that I’m-expecting-a-kiss way like she used to do all the time, a thoughtless reaction born from eight years of habit. Muscle memory kicked in again and he almost did it, moved forward just an inch, a dance to which he could never forget the choreography. Then he realized what he was doing and both of them snapped out of it at the same time. 

“I’m gonna,” he said, gesturing to the cart, and she occupied herself looking for her keys in her purse. He went to put the cart away, and when he returned, they sat in somewhat awkward silence. 

“Oh,” she said, “I almost forgot.” She leaned forward and opened the glove box, rooted around in it, and procured a CD. “Look what I found.”

It was covered in his handwriting: M1X 4 T3H C74RK3. He’d decorated it with less-than-threes, because he couldn’t draw hearts. It had to have been from when they first started dating. By sophomore year, Clarke had an iPod they filled with all their music.

“Oh god, what’s even on this?” he said. 

“I don’t know. Put it in.”

He did. The first song was Elliott Smith, "Needle in the Hay."

“Jesus,” he said. 

“You put that song on every mix.”

Next was Radiohead, “Creep,” and after that, “Kid A.” He continued skipping through. Jeff Buckley, Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground, Guided by Voices, Wilco, Lou Reed again, Sonic Youth, Spiritualized, the Cure, more Lou Reed. No finesse in the song order whatsoever, completely stream-of-consciousness.

“This is depressing,” he said. “You don’t even like this stuff. Why did I make this for you?”

“You were showing me what you liked. You told me I had bad taste in music.”

“I said that?”

“Not in those words. You said you were going to ‘educate me.’”

“That’s worse.”

Back then, she was into John Mayer and Jack Johnson and Jason Mraz and all those other J-named acoustic soft bros. When she was feeling edgy she listened to Evanescence and Coheed & Cambria. She upgraded eventually to the Arctic Monkeys and Vampire Weekend and the Black Keys and Feist. And there was an entire month she listened to “Hey There Delilah” on repeat. That was probably what had bothered him most about her — she had no taste, no singular aesthetic. Her identity was not dependent on the media she consumed. She liked a little bit of everything, and had no shame about any of it. They went to movies and, while Bellamy would leave the theater tearing them apart based on pacing and direction and characterization, Clarke would suck the dredges of her Coke Icee and say, “I thought it was neat.”

It enraged him then. Now he could see how utterly un-pretentious she was. Earnest, forthright, open-minded. She could appreciate and enjoy anything, and she loved to listen to other people describe what they were passionate about. That first year, they listened only to his depressing ‘90s grunge and alternative rock, and he genuinely believed she loved it, too. She wanted to understand him, paid such close attention to him, what he liked, what made him happy; he never offered her the same careful scrutiny in kind. He had been so right in loving her, but wrong in his reasons why. He only loved that she loved him. No wonder she had constantly pandered for his approval; he never actually offered it, had never truly seen her until now.

He ejected the CD. “What have you been listening to lately?”

“Oh!” she said, excited. She got out her phone and plugged in the aux, driving with her knees and occasionally looking at the road. She pulled up Spotify, a playlist of Lana Del Rey club remixes. 

“Do you like Lana Del Rey?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He was only half-lying. He liked the originals, not the remixes. She seemed pleased with his answer and sang along to “Off to the Races” while they drove, bouncing to the beat, and he closed his eyes and listened to her raspy sweet voice that he didn’t realize until this moment he had missed.

They arrived at a gated entrance, where Clarke had to lower her window and press a key card to a box. The gate rolled open, and they continued down a tree-lined lane, around a huge fountain, and turned onto a street where a dozen enormous white houses stood, all eerily similar to each other. She pulled into the driveway of the second one on the left, and clicked the garage door opener. The only thing that separated the house from the ones on either side was a sign in her yard urging people to vote yes on an education levy.

“Don’t tell me this is your house,” he said.

“It’s not my house.” She pulled into the garage, which had a refrigerator in it, and a giant freezer, and two bicycles hung on the ceiling. 

“Really?”

“No, it’s totally my house.” She took note of the look on his face. “You told me to tell you it wasn’t.”

“It’s just you and Madi?”

“And Mom. We renovated the basement into an apartment.” She turned off the ignition and fell back onto the seat. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t think you should come inside.”

_ Why not?  _ old Bellamy would have demanded, annoyed at the thought of not having complete access to something of hers, of her asserting a boundary to him. New Bellamy said, “I can wait out here.”

“I’m just not ready for Madi to meet you yet. And I don’t want Mom to freak out.”

The  _ yet  _ thrilled him. “That’s fine.”

“You’re not like, secretly irked?”

“It’s your house.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re so weird now.”

“I can be irked if you want me to be.”

“No. No, this is good. I like this.”

They made quick work of the groceries, him bringing them from trunk to door, her from door to kitchen. He caught sight of high ceilings and track lighting, a stainless steel fridge, marble counters. A Black Lab came out to greet him, tail wagging furiously, and Clarke dragged the dog back, calling him Roger, and Bellamy was sad to see him go.

He leaned against the side of the car and checked his phone while he waited. She returned in a new outfit, a pretty black shirt, obscenely low-cut, over the same pair of jeans, wedge heels now, hair pinned up, burgundy lipstick. She smelled like perfume, the same she used to wear, the smell he associated most closely with love and comfort and intimacy, that scratched at something deep in his mind and sunk its talons in. 

“You’re cruel,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She stepped closer to him, put her hand on his stomach, idly like she hadn’t even thought about it. “Where to next?”

He directed her to his favorite place on earth, an adult arcade and 3D printer bar, where he went when he had a few extra bucks and cabin fever. It was a ways out of town but worth the drive. It sold alcohol, but the bar was in the basement with the pinball machines, and also, they only had expensive mixed whiskey or moonshine drinks that made him gag to think about. The 3D printer stuff, electronics workshop, and a bunch of vintage gaming consoles were on the main floor, and the arcade was on the second floor. 

“I didn’t know places like this even existed,” Clarke said, awed by what was basically a grown-up millennial Chuck E. Cheese. You paid by the hour rather than by game, so Bellamy logged them in and showed her around. They played Area 51 for over an hour, then Mortal Kombat for just as long, Asteroids, Ms. Pac Man, a jet ski racing game that blew cold air at you, and skeeball. So much skeeball. Bellamy refused to play Dance Dance Revolution but he held Clarke’s purse while she did. They played a Tesla-Edison-themed fighting game that electrocuted you when you lost. It had a big yellow sign warning people with pacemakers not to play it, and was actually super painful, but they kept playing anyway, like idiots, amping up the voltage every round as they became increasingly more competitive, until Bellamy’s hand went numb, and at one point Clarke shrieked and everyone stared. They played three rounds of air hockey, and Bellamy lost two to one, which Clarke bragged about all the way to the cashier, where he paid for both of them for the nearly four hours they’d been there.

“Oh no,” she said once she got in the car and looked at her phone. It was past ten. “It’s almost pumpkin time, and I’m hungry.”

“This might be a crazy idea, but just hear me out.” He paused for dramatic effect. “McDonald’s.”

Her eyes widened. “You brilliant son of a bitch.”

She sped to the nearest McDonald’s, where they pulled up to the drive-thru and Clarke asked him, “Our usual?”

“Of course.”

She ordered a ten-piece Chicken McNugget, large fry, a chocolate shake for him, strawberry for her. She paid, and they got their food and parked in a remote corner of the parking lot. 

“I know I’m supposed to be cool and distant or whatever,” Clarke said with two fries hanging out of her mouth like a walrus, “but this is the most fun I’ve had in years.”

He dipped a chicken nugget in barbecue sauce. “Same.”

“It makes me kinda sad, though,” she said, pulling the fries out.

“Why?”

“There’s so much lost time.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I needed to lose everything so I could appreciate anything.”

She threw a fry at him. “AA needs a better script.”

“That’s not the script. That’s just me.”

“You’re cheesy.”

“You like it.”

“I kinda like everything about you.”

“Everything?”

“Yeah,” she said, and it was too dark to tell if she was blushing, but she was smiling. “Everything.”

She dropped him off at his car. “Let me walk you to your door, like a gentleman,” she said, and got out with him, and they stood between their cars for a long, bittersweet moment.

“Forgive me yet?” he asked.

“No,” she said playfully, without any malice or scorn. “I want to know this isn’t a one-time deal.”

“So you'd want to do this again.”

“Maybe not a whole day, but.” She stepped closer to him. “Yeah, I want to hang out again.”

He wanted to kiss her, that was obvious, and he thought she wanted to kiss him too. It amazed him that there was ever a point in his life that kissing her was as easy as breathing, and he did it dozens of times a day, and now just the thought of it made his heart pound. 

She hugged him. He hesitated a second, struck dumb, and followed, holding her tightly, pressing his nose against her soft neck. 

“I missed you,” she said.

He was dizzy with the smell of her perfume, the surreality of their easy companionship after all these years. Awe, not of how they’d both changed, but all the ways they hadn’t.

“I missed you, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: At the diner, Clarke admits, somewhat flippantly (due to nervousness), that getting pregnant with Madi was a non-consensual scenario. There are several references to emotional and physical abuse, both by Bellamy and Finn, but they are not described.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end note for warnings.

Bellamy floated through the next day on a cloud. He checked his phone constantly in case she texted him, but she didn’t, and he told himself that was fine, they were just friends and friends didn’t need to talk every day. Still, he found himself wanting to share everything with her, from a meme he found on Facebook, to the curlbro at the gym who looked like he was snorting pre-workout, to the sudden memory of I Can Has Cheezburger? and LOLCats and Cute Overload, and did she remember their imaginary future kitten named Peachy McKitten? And when did Clarke turn into a dog person? How old was Roger? Did Clarke highlight her hair or was that her natural color? How had he never thought to ask that before? Did he know at one point and just forgot?

A new memory struck him: Clarke was eighteen and she was on the computer, scrolling through an image search of “short blonde hair female” and he looked at the screen and said, “You’re not getting your hair cut short, are you?”

“Thinking about it.”

He kissed her temple. “Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“I don’t want your hair short.” He threaded his fingers into her hair and pulled gently at the roots, until her throat was exposed to him, and he bent down and bit her neck lightly. “There won’t be anything left to pull.”

She didn’t react the way he wanted, by gasping or moaning, only went loose and blank in his hands, like a doll. He let her go.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She exited out of the tab. Later, when she returned from her hair appointment, she didn’t look any different.

Now, frantic, he went to his desk and pulled out the list of ways he had hurt Clarke, which was nearly two full pages even in his tiny scrawl. At the bottom, he added, _I policed and held unnecessary opinions of your appearance._ He hesitated, then crossed out the word “unnecessary." There was no such thing as a necessary opinion of someone’s appearance.

As if sensing his recollection, his phone went off. The notification preview read, _I had fun yesterday,_ with a heart-eyes emoji.

 _I did too,_ he replied with a red heart emoji, then backspaced and added the blue one, which seemed more platonic. He almost googled if there were some newfangled meaning to the color of hearts that only people ages nineteen and under would understand, but he thought that was too far, even for him. _When are you free again?_

 _Who knows,_ she said, with a morose face.

_Is texting ok?_

_Yeah texting is fine._

_I’m trying not to…. You know. Old habits._

_I’ll let you know if it’s too much._

He wanted to say that he trusted her to know what was best for herself, and he was invested in her happiness and comfort, and would never be hurt by her asserting her boundaries or letting him know her needs, even if they involved him backing off, and he would do his best always to accommodate her. But he wasn’t sure if that sounded defensive, or scripted, which he guessed it was, considering rehab had given him an entire arsenal of mental health jargon that most people didn’t use in casual conversation unless they, too, had been through the recovery ringer.

He waited to see if she’d say anything else, and nervously typed, _How’s your day been?_ hoping that she’d give some detail this time, let him know what she did on Sundays, a pic of Madi maybe, a complaint about Abby.

 _Good,_ she said, and he tried not to be disappointed, but then she continued typing.

_I’m at the park with bean. You?_

He smiled down at his phone, built a picture of Clarke on a bench, texting him between glancing up at Madi on a swing set, or playing with other kids. It was warmer out today, sunny, and he let himself visualize being there with them, on the bench beside her, holding her hand. She had told him yesterday she sometimes imagined Madi as his, and he hadn’t let the idea settle until now. He could have had a daughter. A little girl.

 _It’s ok so far,_ he said, and wanted to give her a breadcrumb of his life, but didn’t want to say he was sitting at his desk lamenting the shitlord he used to be. He settled on, _Getting some work done,_ even though all he’d done was check his email.

Her next text was a picture taken underneath a platform of a playground, sun shining through a series of holes. It took him a second to figure out what it was, because, in all fairness, that wasn’t the position he’d been lying in last time he was there. They’d had sex there once, or maybe a few times, at night after the park had closed. They’d also fooled around in the field behind it, which was where he’d gone down on her the first time. He had no idea what he was doing, only knew it was his new favorite thing, pressing his mouth against the most sensitive part of her and pulling sweet noises out of her throat, feeling her body tense up and writhe and shudder, her hands gripping his hair and hips grinding against his mouth.

The picture meant she was lying there right now, where they’d had sex, thinking of him inside her. He should be tactful about this. Flirty. Suave.

 _Oh my god,_ he said.

_Can’t swing a dead cat above your head without hitting a place we used to bang._

He swiveled his chair around, took a picture of his bed, and sent it to her.

 _YOU STILL HAVE THE SAME DUVET??_ she asked. _ITS BEEN A DECADE BELLAMY._

His comforter was dark blue and reversible, with a lighter, heather blue on the other side. He got it on sale at Walmart for twenty bucks, and a couple of sheet sets. It occurred to him that he’d picked it out without even consulting Clarke. He bought the mattress and box springs too. He decorated the entire apartment. Badly. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what bullshit logic he told himself as to why he never asked her what she wanted. He knew the real answer, though: he didn’t care.

He swiveled back around and added to the list: _I decorated our apartment without getting your input, effectively erasing your presence from our shared space, like you were a guest in your own home._

His phone buzzed again.

 _Wait,_ she added. _Is that our apartment? You still live in our apartment???_

 _Different apartment,_ he said. _Same apartment complex. This one has newer appliances. And faces west._ When she didn’t reply — he could feel her disdain from afar — he added, _I got a rent lock._

A selfie came next, her frowning at him disparagingly, dots of sunlight over her face, and hair fanned out around her head. And cleavage. She made sure to angle the camera so her boobs took up a good portion of the shot.

Ten years ago, he might have replied with something about how much he wanted to suck on her tits. He might have sent her a dick pic. The memory made him cringe, that he ever thought anyone wanted to see his dick, even a woman he’d been dating for most of his young adulthood. She’d always been chill about it, told him how big he was and how much she wanted him, but now he knew the truth, that she was just being nice, and it was wildly inappropriate of him, especially when he knew she was in public, and anyone could be looking at her phone. He wondered how often he’d embarrassed her.

He added to his list: _I sent you dick pics._

Soon he would need to start a new page. He was already coming to realize he had no idea what she ever saw in him, or what she continued to see in him now. In an effort to affirm himself, even though it wasn’t a step, he started a new page and wrote at the top, THINGS I DID RIGHT.

 _I always asked for consent._ He went through as much of their sex that he could remember, but it was so frequent and so intense that it all melded together. He knew he always paused right before he entered her and asked something like, “Is this okay?” She also always said yes. Did that mean she really wanted it? Or was she afraid of saying no? Given how he behaved in other situations, she would definitely have reason to be afraid of saying no to him. Maybe she never wanted sex. Maybe she’d only ever been scared of him or eager to please him.

 _But maybe it was coerced?_ he added. His next bullet point was, _Always made sure you came first._ This time he didn’t even let the pen leave the page — _but I also could have done more to make sure you were satisfied. Whenever I asked you how it was, I was only fishing for compliments._

His phone went off again, and he realized he’d forgotten to reply to her.

_I know I’m hot but I didn’t think you’d get so carried away lol._

He was freaking out now, that the one thing he thought was solidly and constantly good about their relationship, even when things were at their worst, may have actually only been good for him. Now was probably not the time for that conversation.

 _Memories yk?_ he replied. It seemed safe enough.

 _Oh I know,_ she said, with a wink face. She continued typing.

_Can I ask you a personal question?_

PLEASE, he wanted to reply, anything to bridge this bizarre re-getting-to-know-you dance, but settled for, _Sure._

_When you were with other women, did you think of me?_

When the shock of the question wore off, he considered it. The truth was that he could barely get it up while he was drunk, so he mostly only went down on Gina and Echo, which they never complained about. He may have also blown Miller at one point, but it could have been a dream. There were probably a handful of other partners too that he couldn’t remember.

_I haven’t had sex sober since you. So honestly I can’t remember if I did or not._

_I’ve only been with Finn,_ Clarke said. _Whenever we had sex I closed my eyes and pretended he was you._

His brain was a series of exclamation points. His heart was beating in his ears. He stared at the text so long that she added, _Should I not say things like that? You said you wouldn’t freak out._

 _Thank you for sharing,_ he replied, grimacing at the group-therapy script, and hastily added, _Not freaking out._

_Can I tell you something else?_

_Sure._

_When Finn found out I was pregnant with Madi and he threw me down the stairs._

He’d felt the pull of alcohol for a lot of reasons over the past three years, but not once had he wanted to get drunk enough specifically to black out and commit murder. He allowed old Bellamy to take over briefly. He clicked on her contact info and hit Call. She answered on the second ring.

“This is not a conversation we should have over text,” he said.

In the background he heard the laughter and shouts of kids playing.

“Are we still phone people after all this time?” she asked.

“My thumbs are dumb and useless.”

“Not unlike the rest of you.”

“Thanks.”

He crawled onto the bed and lay on his back. Maybe he should get a new duvet. And a new mattress. He bought this one from a guy named Ted who posted handwritten signs by the highway that said MATTRESSES 4 SALE.

“Are you still in the spot?” he asked.

“The fuck spot? Yeah.”

“Is that where we got caught?”

“The time you punched the cop? That was a different park.”

“How many parks did we fuck in?”

“All of them. There was also the bowling alley, the handicap stall of a Chipotle, and a Macy’s dressing room.”

“I thought it was JC Penney.”

“Probably both.”

“And that club. On your twenty-first birthday.”

“You remember that?”

“How could I forget?”

It started on the dance floor. Bellamy didn’t dance but Clarke did, and anyway she was mostly just grinding back onto him, and they’d both had some molly. She was wearing this tiny skirt that barely covered her ass, and it was easy to unzip himself and slide into her. There were bodies everywhere, their friends mostly, pushing against them. No one noticed they were fucking right out in the open, or if they did, they didn’t care. It was the only time Clarke came from his cock alone, multiple times in fact, and Bellamy somehow had even better stamina than when he was sober. He fucked her through three songs and came inside her, and she wobbled off to the bathroom to clean herself up. She found him in a booth a bit later, and sat on his lap and started making out with him. When he got hard again, she hiked up her skirt and settled onto his cock. She had a whole conversation with a very drunk Monty and Harper while “dancing” on Bellamy’s lap.

The next day they crashed, hard, and got into a huge fight about something he couldn’t remember, but he knew it was probably his fault because he never listened to her. She slept at her mom’s house the rest of the weekend, and refused to do drugs again after that, not even edibles.

“So this Finn guy,” Bellamy said.

She blew a breath into the phone and started in on the story, in which she began dating Finn just three months after she and Bellamy broke up. They were still texting then, trying to be friends, and it explains in part why she dropped off the face of the earth. She deleted his number and unfriended him on Facebook because, apparently, Finn made her. They’d been together nine months the first time Finn hit her, an open-handed slap, she said, “and it didn’t even hurt, so I thought, you know, whatever. Not a big deal.” He was big into calling her stupid and nitpicking her behavior and appearance. The next time he hit her, he split her lip, but by then she was numb to everything he did.

“He convinced me I couldn’t afford to live on my own,” she said, “and my mom would never take me back. He isolated me from my friends, so I felt like I didn’t have anyone else. I was manager at the ice cream shop and applying to med schools. He made me cook for him and do all the cleaning and laundry and stuff, so I didn’t have the time or energy to leave him. I’d gotten used to him. It just felt easier to deal with it, you know, like I figured once I got into med school it would all be okay.”

“What about Madi?” he asked, though he was afraid of the answer.

“There was one month I didn’t have time to pick up my birth control. He refused to use condoms. I tried to tell him about the pills, but he kept going, and I tried to fight him off, but he did it anyway. Then I got pregnant with Madi and I thought, stupidly, that he’d finally have to be better. Get his shit together. Nope.”

“And he threw you down the stairs.”

“He wanted me to get an abortion and I said no, and _then_ he pushed me down the stairs.”

“And you left him?”

“A neighbor overheard the yelling and called the cops. He got sentenced to two years but was released after one on good behavior. He lost custody though. Madi has never met him.”

This was one of those situations where he wished he could be angry — properly, blindly angry. Anger was easier than whatever he was feeling now, a complicated mix of sadness and shock and the horrible acknowledgement that someone he loved had been hurt this badly, and he hadn't been there to help, and had no way to help now, either.

“So, yeah,” Clarke said. “You’re basically a saint in comparison.”

“I don’t want you to like me just because I was slightly less abusive than your other ex.”

“Who says I like you?”

“I’m serious.”

“I am too. We both know what you’re capable of. Maybe not raping me or throwing me down the stairs, but — we have this chemistry, you know? We make each other stupid, even when things are good.”

“Especially when things are good.”

They fell into a silence that would have been uncomfortable with anyone else, but they’d spent the better part of five years talking nightly on the phone from three p.m. until one of them fell asleep at midnight-ish. A little girl’s voice, Madi’s probably, said something he didn’t catch, and Clarke said, “Go get yourself an applesauce. It’s in the bag.” Then, to Bellamy, “I’m back.”

“I’m really sorry for what happened to you. With Finn.”

“I’m not. It was bad, but I’m happy now. I don’t take shit from anybody. I don’t want for anything. But I could use a friend, you know. Someone who gets me. Someone to talk to. Nothing heavy.”

Bellamy only knew heavy. He carried heavy in his pocket. Nothing in his life had ever been light. But he could try, for Clarke. He could be what she needed him to be.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

 

* * *

 

Clarke, he learned, was an extremely busy person. Then again, he had a biased perspective, being an extremely un-busy person. Sure, he could work more and hustle harder, make enough for a savings account or IRA or health insurance, but also, he didn’t want to. He enjoyed his routine, as boring and frugal as it was. Clarke only had time to text after work. On the days he didn’t have AA, she called him after Madi had been put to bed, and they talked on the phone for hours, like they used to, him mindlessly playing video games, her flipping through a magazine with a TV on in the background. Bellamy continued talking some nights, well after she'd fallen asleep, or he sang to her even though he didn’t have much of a voice and only knew the lyrics to a handful of songs. Mostly, though, he listened to her breathe, and wished he could be there with her.

“I love you,” he said quietly each night before he hung up, knowing she couldn’t hear him. It was still as easy to say as it had always been.

She began sharing her life in bits and pieces, starting with petty work drama, then eventually the struggles of living with her mother. It surprised Bellamy how differently she spoke of Abby now, with so much less fear and scorn. Her mother was once her greatest obstacle; she was constantly considering how best to earn Abby’s good graces and affection. She habitually inspected herself through Abby’s eyes and altered her behavior accordingly. Now, she talked about Abby like a mildly irritating roommate, a close friend with whom she had a fond but antagonistic banter. Her worst complaint was that Abby, who was retired, didn’t want to help Clarke look after Madi in the evenings, or clean or cook. She was always out with her friends and didn’t want to take on any additional responsibility. The tables had completely turned.

He didn’t have nearly as much to share in return. He’d always considered himself someone of substance, a larger-than-life personality, and Clarke had always been the mild one. He used to say mean things about her behind her back — he called her tofu, as in, absorbed the flavors of everything around her. Now his own mediocrity was apparent to him, and Clarke’s tofu-ness, he understood, had been a survival skill. She was never allowed to be herself, so she molded herself to the desires of those around her. That wasn’t his fault, necessarily. In fact later in their relationship he had begged her to be more authentic, to stop giving a shit what other people thought of her, but she didn’t seem to understand what he was saying, as if “being yourself” was even an option. He once accused her of being a fraction of a person, not enough for anyone to love. 

He realized now that never had a personality, only a drinking problem, a bad temper, and a blatant disregard for authority. Present-day Clarke, when he allowed himself to step back and see her, really see her, was the most colorful person he’d ever met. Her years of constant self-monitoring and subsequent rejection of it had left her with the ability to hold a conversation about any topic. She never argued, even when she disagreed with something he said, only made her disagreement known and proceeded to ask him questions until he boxed himself into a corner with his own logic, and came to see her side. Immigration policy, minimum wage increases, universal basic income, military spending — all topics he could know see in a much clearer light because of her patient teachings. He’d always considered himself a skeptic and centrist, but she was firmly socialist, and he'd nearly been converted. He only fell for the Socratic method a few times before realizing that in most topics, she had better and deeper insight than him, and instead of having an initial disagreement, he learned to simply ask her perspective, and listen to her — really listen to her, without needing to assert himself or defend his beliefs — and then do his own research. He found he didn’t really know anything about anything; he was only regurgitating opinions he’d heard from other men, and following his broken moral compass. Only then did they start to have meaningful and open discussions about politics and society and philosophy, unlike he’d ever had before. He had no idea that talking alone could feel so intimate, when you set aside your fear of rejection and judgment and dismissal, and opened your mind to truly listen. 

She possessed unerring grace and social mores. The only points of awkwardness in their phone calls were entirely his fault. When he let go of control around her, and the idea that he had to be the one steering them all the time, conversation moved effortlessly. She was powerful and confident and assertive, while also being tactful and harmonious. He knew perfection wasn’t possible, but Clarke Griffin came close.

Over the months that followed, they saw each other twice more. Once, when Clarke had forgotten her lunch and didn’t have time to go to the cafeteria, so he came to her work and surprised her with takeout. The waiting room was packed and noisy with kids. She was frazzled, red-faced, ridiculously attractive in her white coat and button-up shirt. She told him she was behind on her appointments by over an hour, but she still sat with him in the break room for fifteen minutes, chowing down, talking with her mouth full, complaining about Jackson calling off, then apologizing for complaining about Jackson, because he’d done nothing wrong, really, it wasn’t like doctors could come to work sick. She finished eating and started cleaning up, but he told her he’d take care of it. She kissed him on the cheek and froze.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just —”

“It’s okay.” He nodded to the door, pretending to keep his cool. “Go ahead.”

The second time, Clarke had wheedled Abby into looking after Madi on a Friday night, and texted Bellamy, _Movie night??_ so she came over to his apartment and he cooked dinner while she sat on the counter and marveled about how nothing had changed. He still had all the same glassware and silverware and plates as their old apartment. All the furniture was in the exact same formations. He was self-conscious that he couldn’t offer her beer or wine or anything, ashamed of himself that a small detail so common when hanging out with someone was something he couldn’t manage. He apologized, but she told him it was okay, she didn’t drink much anyway. She snuck bites of mozzarella and parmesan when he wasn’t looking. At one point she was standing in front of the fridge, talking about something cute Madi said yesterday, and he didn’t want to interrupt, so he put his hand on her hip and guided her gently to the side, got out what he needed, then put her back where she was. She didn’t seem to notice.

They ate on the couch watching _Game of Thrones,_ which Clarke had somehow never seen, and Bellamy cleared the plates after dinner and brought out dessert: double-chocolate ice cream with syrup and Cocoa Puffs, what Clarke always craved when she was high. “Oh my god, I forgot about this, holy shit,” she said. By the time they were on the third episode, the sun had set and the apartment was dark, and Bellamy found himself leaning closer to her, and her him.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, and opened her arms to him. They settled together in their easy old couch-cuddling position, interlocked like puzzle pieces, Bellamy’s head on her chest, her fingers in his hair, rubbing his scalp. Her legs over his lap. They used to lie like this for hours and hours, through movie marathons and their weekly shows, naps on lazy Sunday afternoons, Clarke reading novels to him. He’d seen the show a dozen times already, so he closed his eyes and let himself relax to the soothing beat of her heart.

She woke him up with a soft, “Hey, I have to get going.”

“Where?” he asked, grumpy, and only then realized it was not 2008 and Clarke did not live with him. He ran a hand over his face. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“Same.”

He looked at the clock. It was two in the morning.

“Shit,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to stay? I can take the couch.”

The thought of breaking apart was almost physically painful. Old Bellamy would have picked her up, taken her to the bedroom, and tossed her on the mattress. Took off her clothes piece by piece. Kissed her all over. Gotten her off with his hands and mouth, and settled in for lazy bedtime sex.

“We already fell asleep together,” she said, reasonably, but her gaze was up toward the ceiling. “We could do it again, just, you know, on a different surface.”

In his room, she pillaged the closet and asked, “Where’s my shirt?”

“I don’t have any of your clothes.”

“It _was_ your shirt and then it was my shirt.”

He finally remembered — he had a Bob Dylan shirt that she reappropriated without his permission into a paint shirt. It pissed him off at the time; he even yelled at her for it and made her cry, but after, she kept it as her own, and when she moved out, she didn’t take it with her. He combed through his dresser drawers and found it for her.

“Thank you,” she said, and without warning, pulled her shirt off.

He turned away quickly. “Give a guy some warning.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” He listened to the soft swish and clank of her jeans as they hit the floor, the shirt being long enough to reach her thighs, but just barely. “I’m using your toothbrush,” she said, and left for the bathroom.

He pulled off his shirt and pants, turned off the light, and got into bed. A few minutes later, she returned and crawled in beside him, at a distance.

It had started raining. The window was open and a breeze blew through. He lived on the top floor, so the rain pattered against the tin roof. Slats of light from a street lamp outside shone through his blinds and fell onto her hair. She was watching him, her eyes searching his face, a little wrinkle between her brows that told him she was having some mental battle he wasn’t privy to.

She touched her fingertips to his chest, ran them down to his stomach, and lingered over his scar, a small white oval — a permanent reminder of what he’d done to her.

“I didn’t think it would scar,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It was my fault.”

She traced over the most ticklish part of him, his hip, and he twitched and she smiled. They’d spent so many hours playing with each other’s bodies. He knew if he skated his thumb under her breast, she would get goosebumps. If he touched the mole on her throat, she would gag and swat his hand away. If he licked the spot behind her ear, she would moan. She had scars inside her mouth from braces, a long one down her calf from a horse-riding accident when she was ten. She was ticklish everywhere, but especially behind the knees. She hated her elbows being touched, the sound of fingernails against paper, mushrooms and onions. She put hand lotion on a dozen times a day. She peed in the shower, even when he was in there with her. Her sneezes sounded like the high-pitched squeal of a door hinge. 

Bellamy lifted his arm in invitation. She burrowed under it. He kissed the top of her head, and closed his eyes.

“This feels like coming home,” she said.

 

* * *

 

When he woke up the next morning, she was gone. He rolled face-first onto her pillow and breathed it in, gave himself an entire minute of believing she had an early class, that he could fall back asleep and wake up and she’d be dropping her backpack on the floor, getting undressed and straddling him. She'd tell him not to kiss her because he had morning breath, and he’d go, deal with it, but by then she would have already gotten him hard and sunk down onto him, and after, they’d fall back asleep for another hour.

When he finally made it out of bed, he found the Bob Dylan shirt folded neatly on his desk chair. She’d washed the dishes from the night before and put them away. A pot of coffee had been made, and a mug set beside it. Under the mug was a note: _Good morning! Left early before Mom could wake up and see I was missing. Have a good day! Text me later!_ There were hearts drawn all over the page, colored in with four different colors of highlighter. He didn’t own any highlighters, which meant she carried them in her purse.

Another month passed where they didn’t get a chance to see each other. It was just how adulthood went, he guessed, a herculean effort to maintain relationships outside the daily grind. He was beginning to come to grips with the reality that they were just friends and always would be, and one day she would find someone better for her, and he’d be happy that she was happy. He was okay with it. The thought offered him a surprising amount of peace.

On a Tuesday evening, she sent him a text:

_I want to ask you something that I don’t want to ask you._

_What,_ he said.

_It’s selfish of me. I shouldn’t ask._

_You can ask,_ he said. _And then we can talk about it._

 _Ok,_ she replied, and was typing for a while.

_Raven is getting married next weekend and I’m the maid of honor and Madi is the flower girl and mom was supposed to go to so she could keep an eye on Madi while I do important maid of honor things but she’s noping out and will you come with me to Raven’s wedding?_

He read the text half a dozen times and still it wasn’t settling. She invited him to a wedding. Raven Reyes’ wedding, unless she somehow knew another Raven. Raven, whose parents were never home while they were all in high school, so he spent the better part of four years living at her house, and still never really got to know her. Raven, who joined them in bed a dozen times, maybe more, and which he barely remembered because of how plastered he was. Raven, who, at the end, came over to help Clarke pack her things, called Bellamy a worthless piece of shit, and told him if he ever came near Clarke again, she’d castrate him.

Before he could reply, she added, _There will be alcohol there is the thing and I don’t want you to be in a situation you’re uncomfortable but also I thought it might be fun for us all to hang out again and for you to meet Madi._

 _“Us all” ?? Your friends hate me,_ he replied.

_They won’t hate the new you!!_

_Raven organized a We Hate Bellamy party where you all got together and listed everything awful about me._

_It was cathartic,_ she said. _And you were a dick at the time._

_So I’ll be seated with people who hate me or people I don’t know taking care of your daughter while you’re up front with the bride._

_Yes. But I’ll be wearing a very pretty dress. You like when I wear pretty dresses._

_That is true._

_And we can dance!!_

_I don’t dance._

_Come on bellamy. We can dance if we want to._

_Don’t._

_We can leave our friends behind._

_Stop it._

_If our friends don’t dance_

_Clarke._

_And if they don’t dance they’re_

_I hate you._

_No friends of mine._

_Fine I’ll go but I am NOT dancing._

_Yay!!!_

Clarke thought it would be a good idea for Madi to get acclimated to Bellamy prior to the wedding, which was a win for everyone and meant they could basically hang out whenever. It was summer now, and he met them at the park, the one Clarke had been at on the phone that day. He found her at the swing set, pushing Madi.

“Hey,” she said, and hugged him hello. She was wearing yoga pants and a tank top, and smelled like sunscreen. On the next downswing, she grabbed the chain and slowed it to a stop, to Madi’s audible dismay.

“Madi, I want you to meet someone.”

Madi hopped off the swing and looked up at him. Bellamy squatted down to her level.

“This is my friend, Bellamy,” Clarke told her.

“Hi, Madi,” he said.

“Bell-me,” Madi repeated.

“Bell-uh-me,” Clarke corrected.

“Bell-me,” Madi confirmed. “Do you like My Little Pony?”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“Let me show you.” She took his hand and guided him to the park bench, where an enormous bag sat, and proceeded to root around inside it and pull out a series of small colorful ponies. Clarke looked at him as if to apologize, but Bellamy sat on the grass and listened as Madi explained who each pony was and what their Cutie Mark meant, and gave a full run-down of the surprisingly intricate moral conflicts of certain episodes. He asked questions, genuinely curious now, and it was determined that Bellamy was more of an Applejack and Clarke was Twilight Sparkle and Madi proudly claimed to be Rainbow Dash. Then she asked him if he would help her climb the wrong way up the slide, which he did, and also held her up while she tried out the tallest monkey bars.

Bellamy remembered being afraid of everything as a kid, until Octavia came along and he had to put on a brave front, even though inside he was still terrified every minute of every day. Madi, however, was utterly fearless. She had dried ketchup on her shirt and her hair was a frizzy mess. She was missing three teeth, and her knees and palms were covered in grass stains. She burst into long bouts of singing and dancing for no apparent reason, just like her mother. She muttered little pep talks to herself when she was about to attempt something daring, also like her mother.

“How do you do this?” Bellamy asked while Madi was running in circles, screaming. He was sitting on a blanket in the grass, and Clarke was lying on her back, watching the clouds pass.

“I have no idea,” Clarke said.

“Does she remind you of him?”

“Not really. She’s just me with brown hair.”

“I can see that.”

“I think she likes you.”

“I can see that too.”

“She has good taste.”

Madi tripped over something and fell hard. Bellamy got up and ran toward her, unthinking, and swept her upright.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Her lips were pursed like she was steeling her jaw, and she held out her hand to him, palm up, where little flecks of skin had been scraped away by the gravel, and spots of blood rose to the surface.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re allowed to cry when things hurt.”

“Nana says I have to be strong.”

“The strongest people cry the most.”

A tear welled up in her big blue eyes and slipped down her face. Clarke made it over to them with a first aid kit and cleaned her hands with an antiseptic wipe and bandaged her up. She kissed Madi’s forehead and asked if she was done playing. Madi shook her head, and then, like a switch, everything was okay, and she ran off again.

When the sun started to set, they went to a burger joint for dinner. Madi had worn herself out and fell asleep in the booth after a few bites of a cheeseburger, tucked against Clarke’s side. They talked for a long time, and split a brownie sundae, and talked some more, until a server started vacuuming the floors and putting the chairs on the tables, and Clarke paid for all three of them. Bellamy carried Madi to the car, dead weight on his shoulder, and strapped her in her car seat.

It seemed so wrong, that he wouldn’t be going home with them, putting Madi to bed, getting ready for bed himself and being too tired for anything other than a brief kiss goodnight. Clarke seemed to be thinking along the same lines, sad suddenly. “Maybe you could come over sometime this week. Roger wants to meet you.”

“What about Abby?”

“She’ll deal.”

“No one is going to be as easily convinced I’ve changed.”

“I wasn’t easily convinced. It’s been four months.” She stepped closer, hooked her fingers in his belt loops. “I see it in you. You’ve changed.”

“What if I change back? What if I relapse?”

“You think I don’t think about that all the time? You think I don’t consider it in every person I meet? I’ve lived with the fear of other people my entire life, and all I’ve learned is that you have to love them anyway. You have to love everyone, all the time. Even if they might hurt you, you love them. But you have to love yourself more, so you can leave.”

He ran his finger down a wisp of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. “Are you saying you forgive me?”

“I’ll forgive you when I can trust you, and I’ll trust you when you begin to trust yourself.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“You’ll learn. I have faith you’ll learn.”

She hugged him tightly. He would see her again soon, in just a few days, and text her tomorrow probably, or later tonight. He appreciated that, even if he would never be anything else to her, he could always be her friend. She would let him love her for the foreseeable future. She was back in his life for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Clarke tells the story of her relationship with Finn, which includes rape, physical abuse, and pushing her down the stairs to induce a miscarriage.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end note for warnings.

Bellamy came to Clarke’s for dinner on Wednesday night. In lieu of wine, he brought a salad and rolls he had made himself and the fancy Amish butter Clarke always liked and which they could only afford sometimes, back when they lived together. Abby answered the door. She was smiling, which was scarier than her scorn. Her dressed-down look relieved him only slightly. When he knew her before, she was dressed to the nines all day every day, heels, blazer, jewelry, makeup. Now she was wearing yoga pants and what was probably one of Clarke’s hoodies, and her hair was down. She hadn’t aged a day. It was hard to believe he ever thought she was old.

“Hello, Bellamy.”

“Dr. Griffin.”

She opened the door and gestured him in, where Roger and Madi simultaneously attacked him, Roger wagging his tail so hard his body moved with it, while Madi clung to Bellamy’s leg and started gabbing about all the stuff she’d done that day. Abby dragged Roger away and Bellamy picked up Madi, whose arms were lifted toward him pleadingly.

Abby led them into the kitchen, where he set down his things. Madi stopped speaking mid-sentence and started playing with his hair. Clarke wasn’t around.

“How’ve things been?” he asked Abby.

“Fine, how about you?”

“Great.”

“Can I get you anything to dr —” She seemed to realize her error as she was speaking. “Would you like water? Or we have —”

“Chocolate milk!” Madi interjected.

“And that,” Abby said. Her mouth wasn’t smiling but her eyes were. She had been just as trained in feminine stoicism as Clarke. Probably more so. He wondered what she would be like if she’d been allowed to feel things.

“Water is fine,” Bellamy said.

Clarke joined them soon after and hugged him hello. She looked tired; he hated that she was cooking now, after a long day of work, when he’d done basically nothing. Her hair was in a little ponytail and she was wearing a t-shirt and shorts. She took Madi from him and set her down to go play, and Abby gave him a glass of water and left them to their own devices, apparently as uninterested in getting caught up with Bellamy as he was in getting caught up with her. He watched from the counter as Clarke started pulling things out of cabinets, talking about her day a mile a minute just as Madi had. Once Bellamy got a good idea of where things were and what she was trying to cook, stir fry, he slowly began bringing her the things she needed, chopping vegetables, putting it all together, until Clarke was seated at the counter and he had taken over entirely. It was only when he turned down the heat and asked where the plates were that she stopped and said, “Wait, why are you cooking? How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

She gave him a suspicious glare.

As they ate, Clarke pulled out all the graceful stops, helping Madi with her food at the same time she navigated conversation between Abby, who was stony but cordial, and Bellamy, who was too awkward to function. He continued to be in awe of her capacity to breeze through difficult situations, seemingly unaffected by tension. After the meal, Bellamy offered to clean up, and Clarke bickered with him about it, but eventually relented to letting him help. Abby had taken Madi downstairs at Clarke’s request, so it was just the two of them.

“Want to watch something?” Clarke asked as she put the wok on the drying rack.

They turned out the lights and settled on the couch for more _Game of Thrones._ This time there was no hesitation; they folded into their usual formation. The air conditioning was on full blast, so he covered them with a blanket. After the first episode, she began to fidget as if to get closer to him. Her fingers were in his hair. Normally she kept her legs crossed at the ankle, but she had them spread apart, her foot tucked under her knee. If it were anyone else, he wouldn’t think anything of it, but it was her, and she was a language he knew better than any other.  

He ran his thumb lightly over the skin above her shorts. She spread her thighs wider. He spent half an episode trailing his fingertips back and forth, dipping just slightly down, lower and lower. Her shape under his fingertips had changed. He no longer felt the tense firmness of muscle, but the gentle give of fat. Her shorts were made of flimsy material and a worn elastic band. Her breath sped up as he dipped his fingers just an inch underneath. Her head tipped back.

With his lips brushing against her ear, he asked, “Want me to keep going?”

She nodded.

He sunk slowly into her underwear. She had pubic hair now, wiry curls under his fingertips. He used to make her shave, his reasoning being that he shaved, too. She didn’t like doing it, though, so he did it for her, what began as something of a chore and turned into a deeply intimate process, one of his favorite memories, the quiet scrape of the razor against her skin, her curious eyes and unwavering trust. The kiss he pressed to her clit when he was finished.

He slid the tip of his middle finger into her. She was wet. Soaked, even. She exhaled, the breath carrying a tail-end of a moan. He circled over her clit lazily. She was pretending to watch the show, but her mouth had fallen open and her hips were shifting to meet his movements. He slid his finger all the way in and she made a small broken sound. It was the same as back then, the first time they’d done this. She felt just as tight. He took his time, catalogued all her reactions, marveled at how soft she was, how red she could get, how he didn’t care at all about his own arousal. They were in Raven’s basement watching a movie with the whole crew, something he wasn’t interested in, a Kevin Smith movie. Mallrats, maybe. Or Chasing Amy. No one was paying attention to them, or what was happening under their blanket. He was shocked by the silent force of Clarke’s orgasm, bitten back by her hand pressed to her mouth, the tension held in her muscles and the shuddered waves that ran through her.

He kissed her neck above her collar bone and pulled his hand out of her shorts, ran it up under her shirt and sports bra and pinched a nipple. She probably hated him; he could do this forever. He continued playing with her nipples and she continued ignoring him, except she could no longer keep her sounds to herself. She was whining and moaning and writhing under his hands. He lifted her shirt and bra up and looked at her bare tits, just as gorgeous as they’d always been but larger now, and sucked a nipple into his mouth. She gripped his hair in her fist. He went back to fingering her, this time faster and harder. She clapped a palm over her mouth a second before she came. Her walls pulsed around his fingers. He’d never come in his own pants before, but it was a near thing, watching her completely unravel, her neck bared and flushed pink. Tendrils of hair soaked with sweat at the nape of her neck. Nipples hard and red and wet from his teasing.

He pet her lightly as she came down, then sucked his fingers into his mouth. He missed the taste of her. She was watching him, and gently tugged her bra and shirt back down. Her palm found his cock. He pressed his face to her neck while she stroked him, but when she started unbuttoning his pants, he tugged her wrist away and said, “No.”

“No?”

He shook his head. He didn’t want it to be a transaction. He only wanted to give her something, make her feel good, show his appreciation. They returned to watching the show, for real this time, though he was sure she had no idea what was going on. A few minutes later the basement door opened and they scrambled away from each other just in time for Madi to turn the corner and scream, “It’s time for bed!”

 

* * *

 

The morning of the wedding, Bellamy was up early, watching YouTube videos on how to tie a tie. Aurora had always done it for him. He had no reason to wear a tie since prom. Eventually he ran out of time and roped it around his neck with the hope that Clarke knew how, because Clarke knew everything.

He showed up at her house and rang the doorbell, but no one answered. He came in anyway. Roger was out back, scrambling at the door and whining. Bellamy heard Clarke and Madi talking upstairs. He found them in the master bathroom, Clarke pulling a curling iron through Madi’s hair, wearing a slip and bra and stockings, her own hair and makeup already done. She nearly dropped the curling iron when she saw him.

“I rang the doorbell,” Bellamy said.

“Bell-me!” Madi was already in her dress, baby blue and dotted with white flowers, little white shoes on her feet.

“Hey, kid,” he said, leaning against the doorframe.

“Stay still,” Clarke told her, maneuvering the curling iron in a way that Bellamy simply could not fathom without higher spatial reasoning skills than he possessed. Distracted, she asked him, “Honey, would you mind —” She stopped. Madi’s hair slipped from the curling iron. “Sorry. I —”

“Yes, honey?” he asked smugly.

“Shut up.”

“Mommy, don’t talk naughty,” Madi said.

 _“Bellamy,”_ she said pointedly, and proceeded to rant off a list of things that needed done, feeding Roger and putting him in his kennel, a cup of coffee for Clarke before she went absolutely nuts, pack some food into her purse in case any of them got hungry, a few other odds and ends. Bellamy went to work and got it all done, and when he returned, the bathroom smelled like hairspray and Madi’s frizz was tamed into ringlets like Shirley Temple. Clarke looked exhausted and it wasn’t even ten yet.

“Go downstairs and watch your show,” Clarke told her, and Madi hopped off the toilet and ran downstairs.

Bellamy handed Clarke her coffee. She chugged it, and dashed off to her bedroom. Unlike the rest of the house, her room was a mess. The bed — king-sized, a thousand pillows — was unmade. Small stacks of books were scattered all over, art supplies, sketchbooks opened to abandoned drawings. Pictures of Madi and Abby were hung on the walls between painted canvases, floor to ceiling. The far wall had a bay window overlooking the backyard. This was what their apartment could have looked like. Instead, she had kept all her paintings and art supplies in the closet, her books in a box. No wonder he used to think she didn’t have a personality — he took up too much space. She had no room to be herself around him.

Clarke stepped into her dress, navy blue, very shiny, and pulled it up to her shoulders. She didn’t seem to care he was watching her.

“Zip me?” she asked, her back to him.

He pulled the zipper up, and wondered if he’d be around to unzip her later. He ran his hands over her shoulders and dug his thumbs into the tense knots he found there. Her head fell forward and she let out a long breath.

“We’re not in a hurry,” he said. “They won’t start without you.”

“I forgot how good you are at that.”

“Massages or being late to everything?”

“Both.”

When he let go, she turned around and started tying his tie. He should have kept his hands to himself but he couldn’t, not with her looking like that and standing so close to him. He ran his palms down her sides, watched her as she worked. A decade ago he would have been out of his skin with desire, moved to kiss her, but she would have said, “Don’t mess up my lipstick,” or, “I have coffee breath,” so he would have gone after her neck instead, which would’ve gotten him a “Don’t leave a mark.” And his inability to have her when he wanted her so badly would have made it all worse, and he may or may not have been able to coax her into bending over the mattress, or letting him eat her out before they left. He wanted her just as much now as he did then, but he had restraint now, patience. He could wait his whole life for her if he had to.

She tugged the knot up to his neck and straightened out his collar, and lingered there, her hand coming up to his face.

“You look very nice,” she said.

“Thank you. So do you.”

“I like this, by the way.” She trailed her fingers over his beard. “I wonder what it’ll feel like against my thighs.”

His mouth fell open, and she turned on her heel and walked away.

 

* * *

 

The wedding was held at a horse ranch in the middle of nowhere. The event was set up outside even though it was sweltering out. They arrived early, and Clarke went off to find Raven and help her get ready while Bellamy headed to the altar, and was met unfortunately by the ushers, Monty and Jasper, who both did a double-take when they saw him.

“There’s no way Raven invited you,” Jasper said instead hello.

“Clarke did,” Bellamy said.

“There’s no way Clarke invited you,” Monty said.

“We’re friends now.”

“No way,” Jasper said.

“I’m sober.”

“No _way,”_ Monty said.

“I’m just here to help Clarke take care of Madi.”

When still they only stared at him, he added, “So, how’ve you been?” and Jasper launched into a play-by-play of Monty’s life rather than his own, with Monty chiming in periodically with a correction, and Jasper corrected his correction, until they were bickering, and Monty offered info on Jasper, like it was a competition to see who knew the other’s life better. Monty was married to Harper; Jasper was still single and had at one point joined a cult, but they couldn’t get into the story because people began arriving, so Bellamy took a seat and tried to make himself invisible.

He texted Clarke, _M & J either high or don’t hate me nearly as much as I remember. _

Clarke replied with a picture of Raven getting her hair done and flipping off the camera. He’d never been to a wedding this big. The groom’s side was packed, and the overflow went to Raven’s. He recognized a few people but thankfully no one looked in his direction. He was grateful for such a sunny day; his sunglasses — plus the fact he wasn’t trashed and making a scene — created a great disguise. He had the back row to himself, chair closest to the aisle.

Someone tugged on his sleeve. He looked down and it was Madi with a little basket of flowers. She did not look happy.

“Bell-me,” she said, sternly.

“What?”

“I don’t wanna do this.”

“I know. But once it’s over, there’ll be cake.”

“What kinda cake?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t like vanilla.”

“We’ll find you some chocolate.”

“How long until cake?”

He looked at his watch. “Couple hours, maybe.”

“Are you ready?” Clarke asked, taking her hand. She was out of breath and holding a bouquet of white and blue flowers.

“Bell-me says there’s cake.”

Clarke gave him a look. “Yes there’s cake, but not right now.”

The organ started up, and the crowd settled into silence. The reverend nodded to Clarke to begin.

“Go on, just like we practiced,” Clarke said.

Madi gave Bellamy one last sad look and proceeded down the aisle, angrily throwing petals on the ground. Behind him, Clarke sighed. The rest of the wedding party made it down the aisle, Clarke paired with some creepy-looking dude with an undercut and greasy hair. Raven came last, with her dad, and Bellamy made the mistake of looking up at her, and she looked down at him, and glared. He quickly looked away.

The ceremony started, and Madi refused to stand still, began running in circles off to the side and meandering around. Clarke made eye contact with Bellamy, then gestured her head to Madi. As stealthily as he could manage, he picked Madi up and took her back to sit with him. She squeaked one disgruntled note and fell quiet.

“I want cake,” Madi said. Bellamy shushed her, and opened a game for her to play on his phone. She finally settled down.

The ceremony was pleasantly brief. While Raven and Zeke gave their vows, Clarke’s face slowly broke, chin trembling, nose turning pink. He let himself imagine that one day it would be them up there, though he’d have no groomsmen, except Octavia maybe, assuming all of Clarke’s friends and relatives didn’t excommunicate her for being with him again.

When they first moved in together, waking up beside her remained a novelty for months. He tried to let her sleep, but often he was so overwhelmed that she was really there with him, he would wake her up by kissing her shoulder, touching her all over. She woke up laughing some mornings, never grouchy with him.

The first question out of his mouth was always, “Will you marry me?”

She buried her face in the pillow. “Not today.”

“When?”

“Ask me tomorrow.”

So he did, day after day. He didn’t remember when he stopped, when waking up beside her became normal, when he fell out of love with her. When he stopped loving anything at all.

The ceremony ended, and Raven and Zeke received the guests. Bellamy got in line with Madi on his hip still occupied with his phone. He shook hands with the entire lineup, and when he got to Raven, she wouldn’t let go. Smiling terrifyingly, through her teeth she said, “I don’t know what BS you fed Clarke to get back in her life, but I am watching you, Blake.”

Just as he was about to respond, the person next to him, overeager, captured her attention, and Bellamy made a quick escape. Clarke came and retrieved Madi for pictures and told him to head over to the reception. He did not, because he’d be one of the first to arrive, and he didn’t want to be met with an open bar with no line, so he meandered around the property for a while. Thankfully he found the horses, and leaned against a fence and watched them. There were three, two grazing and one being ridden by a woman at a slow trot. She nodded to him as she passed.

When he returned, the reception was full. It was held under a canopy, and the temperature had settled into a muggy chill. He found his seat at a table near the back, just like he guessed, filled with complete strangers.

The creepy dude, McCreary, gave his toast. It was long and surprisingly meaningful, and when he sat down, the applause was deafening. Everyone lifted their drinks to toast, but Bellamy refused to touch his champagne, as enticing as it was.

“It’s grape juice,” the woman next to him said. Her name plate said Indra. The girl next to her looked like her daughter. Upon Bellamy’s confusion, she lifted her glass and added, “We’re the sober table.”

“Oh,” he said, lifting his glass and clinking it with hers and everyone else’s. He smelled it, and sipped it nervously. It was sparkling white grape juice.

Clarke stood up with Madi on her hip and whispered something in her ear. Madi said into the microphone, “What he said,” and the crowd went nuts.

“How long has it been?” Indra asked as they waited for the caterers to come by.

“Three and a half years. You?”

“Seventeen.”

Talking to Indra was easy, knowing they had something so enormous in common. He spoke with the other people at the table, too, and felt strangely at home knowing they had fought the same battle he was fighting. He could see it in them now, the things they carried with them, sensitivity and empathy, the ability to listen openly, slight tenuousness in everything they said as if thinking through it first. Nothing any other stranger would notice unless they’d been through it too.

When the plates had been cleared away, Indra touched his arm and said, “We’re ducking out before the party starts.”

He said it was good meeting them and they left. Slowly the rest of the table disbanded too. The cake was cut and shoved into Raven and then Zeke’s face. The plates cleared and the lights lowered and music started. Raven and Zeke had the first dance, then other people joined in. He got a text message.

_Bean incoming_

He looked up and Madi was rushing toward him. She was out of breath. “Mom said you would help me eat cake while she did Mom stuff.”

He gave her his piece which he hadn’t touched, and tucked a napkin into her dress so she wouldn’t get it all over herself. She ate all the frosting and almost none of the cake, and somehow she got some on her forehead. He cleaned her up as best he could, even did the thing his mother did, lick his thumb to rub at the smudge.

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” Madi said. The dancing was in full-swing now, and Clarke was nowhere to be seen.

“Can you do that by yourself?”

She looked at him like he was stupid. “Duh.”

He waited outside the women’s restroom for her. It was quieter over here, inside a large foyer and therefore blissfully air conditioned, and there were no drunk people.

“He’s been sober three and a half years,” he heard Clarke say. He glanced around a corner into the hallway leading to where he imagined Raven had gotten ready earlier that day. She was talking to Raven. He pressed himself against a wall and listened.

“He tried to kill you,” Raven said.

“Yeah, well, I stabbed him.”

“In self-defense!”

“We were kids.”

“You were twenty-two. You were not a kid, and even if you were, that doesn’t excuse what he did to you.”

“I can’t explain it. He’s changed.”

“People can’t change, Clarke. What a person is capable of once is what they’re always capable of.”

“That doesn’t mean he’ll do it again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t know anything. That’s why it’s called faith.” She paused. He wished he could see Raven’s expression, which he imagined was skeptical, or maybe even disdainful. “He’s learned, okay? I’ve talked to him on the phone almost every night for four months and he hasn’t once interrupted me, or spoken over me, or belittled me. He’s there when I need him and gives me space when I ask for it. He respects me now.”

Raven clapped. “Bravo, he’s reached the bare minimum of human decency.”

“I’ve always loved him for the person I thought he could be. He’s finally becoming that person.”

“Does he have a degree? Life aspirations? A job? Don’t you think you can do better than a guy whose biggest achievement is not being an asshole?”

“He freelances. He’s keeping himself together.”

“Look, Clarke, I’m really happy he finally apologized to you. But it took _ten years._ If you’re looking to get back together with him — I know you’re lonely, but you don’t need to settle for a deadbeat alcoholic.”

“He’s not like that anymore. I trust him. I love him.”

There was a pause, and Raven said softly, “I’m sorry you’ve only loved men who have been cruel to you, but there are better people out there. You don’t have to choose the lesser of two evils.”

“Where are they?” Clarke sounded angry now, her voice wobbling, turning huskier like it did right before she cried. “Where are these better people, Raven? I’ve done every online dating site, singles groups, meetups — there’s nothing for me out there. None of them get me like he does. None of them have our history, our chemistry. I don’t care that I make more money than him —”

Madi opened the door and announced, “I’m done.”

“Did you wash your hands?” Bellamy asked, though his voice sounded strained and far away, his heart was thumping in his throat, and he was shaking much worse than usual.

“Uh huh.” She raised her hands for him to look. They were still wet. He picked her up and booked it out of the foyer before Clarke could catch them.

She found him a handful of minutes later. He was sitting at an empty table, and Madi was dancing to the music holding his hand up occasionally and twirling underneath it. Clarke ran her fingers through his hair and asked, “How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” he said. “Great.”

She frowned. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Hey, will you take her for a bit? I need some air.”

“Sure.”

On his way out, he found the open bar and stood in line. It was a ways outside the reception tent. Clarke would never see him. They had an assortment of wine and beer, but the Red Label caught his eye. He’d order a double just to take the edge off, to silence the memory, of Clarke’s eyes wide in terror, the piercing pain in his gut.

Aurora had passed just a few months before. It was sudden, an aneurysm. The first month, he convinced himself she was still alive, on the other side of town, and he was just too busy with Clarke and work and living his life to reach out to her, and her him. The second month was harder as the truth began to settle — he would never see his mother again. Never hear her laugh. Never buy her another birthday gift. Never call her on Mother’s Day. He couldn’t even remember the last thing he’d said to her. The last time he saw her. No one told him that when you grew up and moved out, you had to go out of your way to keep your parents in your life, tend to the relationship the same way you did with friends. He had let their relationship wither because it was inconvenient for him to maintain.

He had a handful of odd jobs at the time. Handyman work, when he could find it. Some mornings he woke up early enough to get in line at a moving company, and spend the day hauling furniture from one building to another. He fixed the occasional computer. It was all pennies, added up over the weeks to make his share of rent. Meanwhile, Clarke was getting promoted at the ice cream shop, and keeping up her 4.0 GPA. Her dad was no longer in the picture, but at least both her parents were still alive. Everything she did bothered him. Bouncing her knee under the table. The absolute silence she needed to study. Her thirty bottles of whatever-the-fuck around the sink and bathtub. The pitch of her laugh. Her nightly showers, and going to bed with her hair soaking the pillows. The dirty mugs she left everywhere, filled with dried tea bags or watery paint. Dishes piled in the sink. Laundry unfolded in the dryer for days. Food rotting in the fridge.

He couldn’t remember the start to a single one of their fights. One minute they were fine, and the next, he was screaming. Sometimes she screamed back. Most of the time she started crying, and that pissed him off worse, showing weakness, breaking under his strain. When it got to be too much, he went out to a bar, got trashed, and came back home. He looked at his phone and found ten missed calls and thirty messages, all apologizing for whatever she did wrong, and would he please not drive drunk? She offered to pick him up, do anything he asked, if he would please, please come home.

He was a mean drunk. His mission was to find all the things she loved and break them. He tore apart her sketchbooks, put his foot through her paintings, snapped her paintbrushes and pencils in half, tore her clothes, threw her jewelry down the garbage disposal. The first couple times he ravaged her things, she cried and pleaded for him to stop. The subsequent times, she only watched blankly, flinching when something would whiz past her head. He shouted as he did it, nonsensical things that he couldn’t remember now but which he knew were cruel — sentiments about her he’d held in secret, that she was boring and shallow and fake, the definition of vapid. Complete lies to pull her down to his level, that she was stupid and worthless, she needed him, she’d never be anyone without him. One time, he threw a biology textbook in her direction, meant to hit the wall, but she moved at the wrong moment, and it hit her square in the face. She crumpled to the floor and he told her to get up, but she was out cold. When she came back around a moment later, he accused her of doing it on purpose, playing the victim to make him look bad and feel guilty. She apologized, and cried, and it finally struck him, then, that he’d hurt her. He really hurt her. So he apologized too, and said it would never happen again, that he wouldn’t drink as much anymore. He promised, he promised.

He thought things had calmed down a little, but they got into another fight a few days later. It was early in the morning. They were both trying to get ready — Clarke for class, him for an interview at Best Buy. He was hungover, had been out the night before until three in the morning, and he couldn’t remember how he got home. She stayed awake waiting for him, and when she reminded him of his promise, he’d accused her of manipulating him, making him feel bad for having fun. She was just jealous that he was allowed to live his life, and she was buried in schoolwork and a job she hated. When she tried to defend herself, he told her to fuck off, and locked her out of the bedroom. She slept on the couch.

He was looking in his closet for his nice shirt. Clarke had been shouting at him from the other room, and suddenly went silent. He paused, and still heard nothing. When he went to the kitchen to inspect, he found her at the counter hovering over his open wallet. His driver’s license was in one hand, a pair of scissors in the other. She cut his license in half.

“Good fucking luck finding a bar that won’t card y—”

He took her by the throat and threw her against a wall. Her head slammed against it, and her face went slack just as it had when he threw the book at her. This time she didn’t lose consciousness. He squeezed her throat, felt her struggle to breathe under his palm. Her pulse thudded slowly against his thumb. She was no longer afraid of him. Didn’t struggle. Stared defiantly albeit dazedly into his eyes. He wished he could say he was drunk, out of his mind, but he knew exactly what he was doing, and he did it anyway. Her body was his body. He destroyed himself, so he destroyed her, too.

“Was it worth it?” he asked, voice low and calm.

Her face and eyes were growing red. She tried and failed to pull in a breath. Her arm jerked forward. He didn’t feel it, at first, such an odd sensation that it didn’t register at all to him. Then, a blast of pain. He let go and stepped back, staring down at the scissors protruding from his stomach, blood trickling out of the wound.

He moved to pull them out, but Clarke said, “Don’t.” Her voice was just a wisp. She grabbed a towel and told him to keep pressure on it. He almost said no, it was one of his mom’s nice hand towels, not one of the shity ones they’d bought at IKEA. She picked up her car keys as if she’d drive him to the ER, but she couldn’t make it to the door, had to sit on the arm of the couch and steady herself on the wall.

“You have a concussion. You can’t drive,” he said.

They helped each other to the car. Clarke puked in the parking lot, and conceded to letting him drive.

“We can’t go to the same place,” she said. “We’ll get arrested.”

They fought over the music, Taylor Swift’s new album he’d downloaded and put on her iPod as a birthday gift, neither of them thinking to turn it off. She finally agreed to go to the ER since they had an MRI, and he’d go to Urgent Care. When he pulled up to the front of the ER, she wiped her eyes and said, “I’m sorry.”

He squeezed her hand. “‘Tis but a scratch.”

She laughed so hard she started coughing, got out of the car and stumbled into the ER. He drove a few blocks down to the Urgent Care, where his wound really wasn’t that bad, hadn’t hit any major organs, and he left with a few stitches. Looking back, he suspected she had aimed intentionally.

He had made it to the front of the line now. The bartender asked what he wanted. In the tent, “Come on Eileen” ended and “Sweet Caroline” began. He could get his drink, trade in his chip, and start again at zero. Clarke and Madi were holding hands and dancing and singing together. He pulled his wallet out, and before he could thumb through the bills, caught sight of his license. A flimsy piece of plastic with an ugly picture, and they’d almost killed each other over it. It wasn’t worth it then, and it still wasn’t worth it now.

“Sorry,” he said, “nevermind.”

He returned to the horses. One of them came up to him and nudged his hand. He pet its nose, focused on the feel of hair under his palm, the warmth. The horse blinked slowly and shifted from hoof to hoof, occasionally ducked its head a little closer. The night was just as heavy as the day had been, and out here in the country, a thousand stars shone in the sky. The air was sticky with humidity and filled with country nightsongs, crickets and frogs and cicadas. Finally Bellamy felt calm enough to return to the reception.

Clarke was sitting at his table near the back. She propped her bare feet on his thighs when he sat down, and he started rubbing them. She hated wearing heels.

“Where’s Madi?” he asked.

Clarke nodded to the dance floor, where Madi was hopping up and down with a group of other kids. The crowd had thinned out considerably.

“Are you okay?” Clarke asked.

“Yeah.”

“I saw you at the bar.”

He froze. It wasn’t an accusation. Just an observation. She had no malice in her tone. She wasn’t demanding anything of him.

“I was tempted, but I didn’t.”

She smiled at him. “I’m proud of you.”

A slow song came on. Something cheesy and overplayed that he’d probably heard at a grocery store or bank. She pulled her feet off his lap and took his hand. “Dance with me?”

“We talked about this already.”

“Please? Just one.”

Raven was still dancing with Zeke. Bellamy didn’t want to ruin their fun by existing. “I don’t know.”

“Close enough.” She dragged him to the dance floor and put her arms around his neck. It felt deeply nostalgic. When they first started dating, slow dancing was the only time they could be close to each other. Freshman year homecoming, he was so nervous, his sweaty hands on her waist, arm’s distance shrinking as she slowly pressed against him. Later, when his mom dropped her off, Bellamy walked Clarke to the door and kissed her, light and dry and innocent, but good all the same. It would take him another two months to find time alone and kiss her again, properly this time, deep and easy and feeling a little wrong about it, a lot scared. He knew then he already loved her, and thought he always would.

She whispered in his ear, “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure.”

“On the phone, I hear you say you love me.”

He had no idea if he should apologize or backtrack or —

“Can I tell you another secret?” she asked. He nodded, and she leaned closer. Her lips grazed the shell of his ear. “I love you too.”

 

* * *

 

Madi fell asleep on the car ride home. They drove with the windows down, and Clarke held his hand. The music was off but she sang for him. Back at the house, Bellamy carried Madi inside and laid her in bed. Clarke pulled off her shoes and tucked her in.

She led him into her bedroom, where she turned her back to him and said, “Unzip me?”

He tugged the zipper down, and her dress fell, her slip next. She was left in her bra and a little white thong. He wanted to tell her this wasn’t working out, leave before they could get carried away in each other, but he was weak. He’d always been weak — for her, for alcohol, for anything that could make him feel like someone else, someone better than the person he really was. She stepped closer to him and pushed his suit jacket off his shoulders.

When their lips met, he felt whole again for the first time in a decade. Her kisses were no different, still as sweet and insistent as they’d always been. He reached behind her back and unclasped her bra, which fell down her arms and pooled onto the floor with the rest of her clothes. He backed her toward the bed and she fell onto it. For a moment he just looked at her. Years ago she would have pretended to hate the attention, cover her face with her hands. But now she let him look, open and unashamed, daring him to do whatever he was going to do next.

“Can we pretend?” she asked.

“Pretend what?”

“To be the people we used to be.”

“I don’t think either of us want that guy in our lives anymore.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

He stifled a smile, ran his hand up the inside of her thigh. “Then what do you mean?”

She opened her mouth to answer, and recognition came over her face, that he was already playing along.

“I can’t tell you,” she said, jutting her chin up.

He leaned down and kissed her, his tie skating over her bare skin. She bracketed his hips with her thighs and tugged him closer.

“You have to tell me what you want,” he said. Back then, she couldn’t say what she needed to say, too shy to speak such dirty words, so she would tap his lips instead. He’d pretend he didn’t understand, kiss some random spot and say, “You have to tell me.” Over time, she went from “Use your mouth” to “Go down on me” to “Eat me out” and finally, “If you don’t put your tongue in my cunt right now, I will literally kill you.”

“Or what?” she asked.

“Or I’ll do what I want.”

He bit her throat; she moaned. “What do you want?”

He moved down her body, until his knees hit the floor. He rubbed his beard against her thigh, trailed kisses all the way down. He took her by the hips and dragged her to the edge of the mattress. “I want to eat you out until you scream.”

Already she was writhing, breath heavy. “How many?”

Like calling the pocket while playing pool, he liked to tell her in advance how many times he intended to make her come. “Three.”

She laughed, delighted. “I don’t know if my body can do that anymore.”

“Four.”

“Bellamy.”

He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled his cuffs to his elbows. “Fine, five.”

Before she could argue, he slid the crotch of her panties to the side and sucked her clit between his teeth. She gasped and arched off the bed. Her body was an instrument he knew how to play by muscle memory alone; no matter how many years it had been, the music was still the same. She liked to be teased for a long time to get warmed up, light passes with the tip of his tongue. When she was soaked and writhing, he lifted her hips and pulled off her underwear, tucked them in his pocket, and returned to her, this time pressing two fingers inside.

He felt a twinge in his jaw after only a few minutes. He used to be able to go for an hour or more before the strain started to get to him. He went down on her so much and for so long that sometimes he worried he’d have permanent damage later in life. She used to tell him he should put “eating pussy” on his resume because it was his greatest skill, and that she’d be willing to write him a glowing letter of recommendation.

Her first orgasm was sudden and intense, easier than he expected. She dragged a pillow over her face to stifle herself. He backed off while she was still coming, not touching her at all, a weird trick that for some reason drove her crazy, and made her subsequent orgasms easier. He sang the alphabet in his head, which was the exact amount of time she needed to cool down before he continued.

The second orgasm was always the most difficult. He went hard and fast, could feel it build and dissipate over and over, until she caught onto it and came again, back arching off the bed, hips grinding onto his face. After the second, she didn’t need a cool-down, so he kept going, curled his fingers up and gently rubbed her g-spot, and after a minute, she came again, this time hovering at the peak until the fourth hit her, and she had barely climbed down from that when she climbed up and found the fifth.

He leaned back on his heels and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. His jaw was on fire, his cock hard in the leg of his pants. Clarke was rolling onto her side, out of breath and twitching with aftershocks. He got up to get her a glass of water, and returned to find her moved up on the bed and snuggled under the covers.

“Will you stay?” she asked.

“For a little bit.” He took off only his shoes and tie before crawling into bed beside her, and rubbed and kissed her back the way he knew she liked.

“I don’t have a condom,” she said.

“It’s fine.”

She turned around and kissed him, tugged at his belt. “Let me.”

“No, really, it’s —”

“I want to.”

“You —” But she was already climbing between his legs and undoing his fly. She pulled his cock out of his boxers and wrapped her lips around it. Her mouth was still as small and quick as it had always been. She sucked him off expertly. If he prided himself on teasing her, seeing how long he could draw it out, she prided herself on her brusque efficiency, a challenge to see how long he could keep himself under control. Back when they had sex once or twice a day, he could go a long time, but these days he only masturbated a couple times a week, and hadn’t gotten a blowjob in years.

“Fuck,” he said, feeling the rapid climb, teetering at the brink. A soft swipe of her tongue and he was done for. She swallowed him down as he came, and he watched her, knowing this was the first and last time this could happen, that they wouldn’t see each other again, a truth he’d held in his chest since he overheard her conversation with Raven, but only now opened to him.

She reached over him to get her water from the bedside table and chugged it all in one go, then settled in beside him, her head pillowed on his chest, and covered them with the blanket.

They didn’t talk. He looked out the bay window and listened to her breathing. It grew deep and even, and he let himself hold her and comb his fingers through her hair for nearly an hour before finally pulling away, careful not to disturb her. He found his tie and put on his jacket, and from the inside pocket, he pulled out his list. It was three pages now. He found a pen, and on the back, wrote, _Raven is right. You don’t have to choose the lesser of two evils._

He left it under the empty water glass, and stood for a long moment just looking at her, sated and asleep under the moonlight. He had the right idea at fourteen — he would love her the rest of his life. He knew now, though, he didn’t deserve to be loved back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter we find out what Bellamy did to Clarke that made them break up: he went on rampages where he destroyed her things, and threw a book at her head. She cut his driver's license in half, and he choked her, and she stabbed him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end note for warnings.

Clarke gave him a little less than twelve hours before she texted, _What the fuck bellamy._

He watched the ellipses rise and fall repeatedly for several minutes, and then, _Raven was stressed and tipsy and talking out her ass. She doesn’t know anything. Don’t listen to her._

There were a thousand things he wanted to reply, but he flipped his phone to silent, and set it face-down on the coffee table. Over the next few days, she texted a dozen more times and called. She left him a voicemail telling him if he was going to ghost her, that was it for them, she couldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior, not when she had a kid to look out for who had already gotten attached to him, not when she had her own abandonment issues because of her dad. It wasn’t fair, she said, that after all this, he would do something so petty as to ghost.

 _I’m not ghosting,_ he texted back. _I’m keeping my distance._

_I didn’t ask you to keep your distance._

An hour later, she texted, _Tell me you still love me._

He stared at the text as if it were some kind of game. If he said he loved her, would she rope him into more conversation? If he didn’t, would she stop talking to him entirely? He hadn’t thought this through — part of him knew she would chase after him. She always had before. It didn’t occur to him that she might actually sever ties. Conversely, it also didn’t occur to him that his absence would actually hurt her. The situation had become even more untenable than before. He hadn’t learned anything, really. Hadn’t grown at all.

 _I love you,_ he said, and she didn’t reply back. He wondered if it was the end.

 

* * *

 

On Thursday night, as he was leaving AA, he found her waiting outside for him. She looked angrier than he’d ever seen her, which was saying something, considering she'd stabbed him once. She’d just come from work, based on her fancy clothes and frazzled hair. His list was in her hand. He walked past her, but she followed close behind.

“This is childish,” she said. “You’re a grown man, Bellamy. You can’t just run away from —”

He stopped abruptly and turned on her. “Did you read it?”

She reeled back, a flicker of surprise settling into disdain. “I don’t want to.”

“Then read it.” He nodded to the list. “Out loud. Right now.”

She stared at him for a long moment, then unfolded the list.  “‘One, I made you watch me play video games you weren’t interested in, and never asked if you wanted to play.’” She glanced up. “First of all, you didn’t _make_ me do anything. I _liked_ watching you play video games.”

“Bullshit. No one likes watching people play video games. Keep reading.”

“‘Two, we had a codependent relationship, and even when I figured out how fucked up it was, I didn’t do anything to fix it.’ Well neither did I.”

“Did you know, though? Did you know what was going on, or did you think it was okay?”

She thought it through but looked pissed about it. “I never really questioned it.”

“Because I had the power, not you, and I knew it, and I did nothing. I liked having power over you. I liked _using_ that power over you. I liked making you afraid of me, afraid of leaving me. That’s the kind of man I am. Keep going.”

She looked like she wanted to argue, but relented. “‘Three, and this should probably be number one but I was too chickenshit to write it first. I physically, verbally, and emotionally abused you.’” She kept reading silently. “And you go on to describe it. I’m not reading the rest. I lived it already.”

“I want you to sit down and read the whole list, and if you still want to talk to me, then we’ll talk. But I don’t think you will.”

“You’ve changed, Bellamy.”

“I still hurt you. The things I’ve done — they’re not redeemable. I reached out to you to make amends, you denied me, now we can move on.”

“You’re the man I’ve always dreamed you’d become.”

It didn’t matter. He started walking away.

“I forgive you,” she said to his back.

His hand had balled into a fist in his pocket, instinctively wrapped around his chip. The edge dug painfully into his palm.

“I’m not chasing after you,” she called. “I won’t beg you to be in my life.”

“Good," he said, and kept walking.

 

* * *

 

A week passed. He skipped AA twice and told Pike he was sick. He phoned in his therapy appointment, filled up the whole time talking about Octavia, how he hadn’t seen her in years despite her attempts to reach out to him. He loved his sister more than he’d ever loved anyone. He helped raise her. She had some behavioral issues so Aurora chose to homeschool her; on her first day of kindergarten, she bit the teacher’s pinky finger. Three months in, she was still crying two hours after being dropped off. She hadn’t made any friends. The school counselor recommended that she finish up kindergarten at home and try again in first grade, but after they saw how well she behaved at home, they decided to keep her there. Bellamy helped where Aurora and Aunt Celeste struggled — math, mostly, biology and chemistry. Subjects that were fresh in Bellamy’s mind and which he excelled at. Octavia learned best when he was teaching her. She never lashed out at him like she did with other adults. She was cruel to Celeste, cold to Aurora, but she looked at Bellamy like he was Christmas morning every day of the year.

He felt good when he was around her. Important. Before she was born, he’d been so anxious and afraid for no seeming reason, cried at the slightest things. He had nightmares of house fires and woke up screaming. Aurora and Celeste both smoked; before bed each night, he carefully inspected their ashtrays for stray embers, refused to let them be thrown away and instead doused the ashes in the sink. When he learned about lung cancer, and was old enough to understand the concept of death, it became his new fixation — his mother and aunt were gambling with their own mortality. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing them.

Celeste had always told him he was too sensitive; Aurora hoped he’d never change, that he’d stay her sweet little boy forever. But somewhere something went wrong, and the fear he’d held so close to his heart burrowed itself deep and grew roots of anger and despair and shame. All-consuming self-hatred. When Clarke came around, beautiful brilliant Clarke who made him feel worthy of his own existence, he wanted to bottle up that worthiness and never let it go. He valued Clarke and Octavia and his mother only for how they made him feel. He was attached to them, terrified of losing them. He wanted to own them, not love them. But he’d never learned the difference.

The last time he saw Octavia was after his first stint in rehab. She picked him up from the airport, thrilled to see him, treating him like he’d gotten back from a long vacation or business trip, completely ignored the fact they hadn’t spoken in years. The second he found a moment alone, he'd planned to go to the very same liquor store he’d held up and buy a bottle of Tully. She told him all about her life, that she had a boyfriend now, and decided to start going to public school a few years ago, and she was on the varsity soccer team and applying for college scholarships. She wanted to be a sports management major. Celeste had breast cancer recently and a mastectomy, but she beat it and now she was fine.

“So?” Octavia had asked when they arrived at his apartment, just as he was about to climb out of the car. “Are you coming?”

“To what?” he said, realizing he hadn’t really been listening, only staring at the clock and guessing how long it would take him to go to the store, trying to remember which cashier had been working when he robbed the place, and if they had his picture up or something like that and would refuse to serve him.

“Graduation.”

“Yeah, definitely,” he said. “Thanks for the ride.”

He got an invitation a couple weeks later, and also an event invite on Facebook, and a text from Octavia two days before the party. She didn’t text him often, probably because she couldn’t handle the disappointment in his replies, or lack thereof. He didn’t end up going to her graduation, even though he knew how much it meant to her, how much she struggled in school, how hard it must have been living alone with an aunt who meant well but wasn’t all there sometimes, and a dead mom, and an alcoholic brother who ignored her. He didn’t let himself think about how lonely she'd probably been these past few years. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that she was the face of everything he should have been and everything he wanted to be. He resented her for her charisma and good nature in the same way he resented Clarke for her intelligence and success. To look at her too closely was to see his own wasted potential, the myriad wrong paths he took. All the ways he’d failed her.

Despite having discussed Octavia a hundred times, his therapist was having a low day herself and bought his heart-wrenching performance. He turned his out-of-office on and stopped going to the gym. He chucked money at his Steam account and immersed himself in any RPG that could keep his attention. He played and replayed Dragon Age and Mass Effect and Portal. He forgot to eat for long stretches of time, nearly an entire day, then went out and binged whatever sounded good. He slept ten or eleven hours a night.

The voices came back slowly, quietly. Not literal or even hallucinatory, but “voice” was only word he had, like thoughts that didn’t belong to him, that had been given to him by someone else. The last time he’d heard them was after Aurora died. At the time, booze had been the only thing that silenced them, but back then, he couldn’t differentiate the voices from his own thoughts. They certainly felt like one in the same, no different than any other inner monologue. And they were very reasonable, too, like a salesman so good you don’t know you’re being sold anything. You hurt, they said. You have always hurt more than you know what to do with. You have no left who loves you. No one needs you. No one wants you. No one will miss you. But there is an option.

He tried to fight them off with his arsenal of coping skills. He wrote in his journal, which worked something like a long letter to his mother. He forced himself, at two in the morning, when the voices turned from low murmurs to screeched obscenities, to go on a run. He ran and ran until he exhausted himself, and returned home and passed out. He tried not to think about how easy it would be to get wasted and forget everything.

Over the long span of days, the voices turned to images, the images into ideas, the ideas into a plan, the plan into action. He found himself on a Friday afternoon settled in his empty bathtub, a gun in hand. It had been his mother’s. When she first got it, shortly after he moved out, he was furious. She said she needed protection now that he was no longer around. He told her that people who owned guns got shot.

It occurred to him suddenly that he was wearing his favorite shirt. Grey, v-neck. His mom had bought it for him, not for Christmas or his birthday, but because she was out shopping with Celeste and “just dropped by” the men’s section. It was on sale, she’d said, but he knew it wasn’t. He'd seen the price tag. She just wanted him to have something nice. It was softer than his other shirts, fit better. He wouldn’t want to get anything on it. He pulled it off. Folded it neatly. Set it on the toilet lid.

He wished he hadn’t given away his list. He had something to add to it. _I threatened to kill myself when you wouldn’t bend to my will._ He’d threatened so many things — to move out, knowing Clarke couldn’t afford the apartment on her own; to leave her, knowing her biggest fear was being alone; to give her the silent treatment, knowing neglect hurt her worse than anything else.

But now he wasn’t making threats, and he didn’t want or need anything from her. Here was the box he had trapped himself in: he did not deserve to be loved, yet he could not imagine living the rest of his life without love. He had focused so intently on his progress, how far he’d come, that he never bothered to look ahead. A year, five years, ten, he may have never returned to drinking, but he also knew his life would never improve. The gym, library, diner, gaming, therapy, AA — day-in, day-out until he died, meanwhile wasting so many resources, and not contributing anything good or meaningful to society. He was a small yet insidious blight on the world.

He pressed the barrel of the gun to his temple. No, the blast would get all over his bathroom and some poor cleaning person would have to deal with scrubbing blood and bits of skull out of the grout. He switched to his left hand, which shook worse than his dominant right, so there was a chance he’d miss his mark. He shoved it under his chin, jammed it hard against the soft flesh. Then he placed the barrel in his mouth, rubbed his tongue along the warm tangy metal. He slid his thumb against the trigger, and let it rest there.

His body was too small to hold all the feelings trapped inside it. They could never pass through him. They piled up and crystallized, more and more, and he walked around dense with it. He suffered. He didn’t know why, but it was constant, and it could never be released.

A voice came to him, then, separate from the salesman pushing his thumb against the trigger. Strangely, the new voice sounded an awful lot like John Murphy. It told him, _You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me._

After Bellamy had robbed the liquor store, he got shuffled into a rehab in Florida. No one used their real names. Most people were referred to by their location, so everyone referred to Bellamy as Missouri, which was quickly shortened to Misery. In rehab, you made weird connections — not quite friends, but too intimate to be acquaintances. You formed intense bonds and they disappeared the second one of you left. Murphy was the only real friend he made, enough to know his real name anyway. To everyone else he went by Houston. When Bellamy first arrived, he stuck close by Murphy for some reason, and came to appreciate his bluntness and ability to confront the most difficult of situations. In group, he made a lot of affirmative remarks, and was the first to defend anyone being invalidated by a rookie. In the real world, he was an orderly, and his vice was Fentanyl patches, which he began stealing at age eighteen for his mother who had fibromyalgia.

Bellamy’s first major breakthrough happened three and a half weeks in. He was invited to share in group, and admitted he had a drinking problem, but it had only manifested in the last year or so. The group smelled his bullshit right away and started asking more questions, drilling down until he was spilling his guts about Clarke, how they were perfect, just perfect, and then she stabbed him because she was a crazy bitch.

“And what did you do to make her stab you?” Murphy asked.

“I didn’t _make her_ stab me.” Bellamy lifted his shirt to show the scar, a gesture he’d done dozens of times over the years whenever anyone would give him the time of day. “I’m the victim here.” _Validate me,_ he later realized he was begging. _Tell me I was in the right. Tell me she deserved it, and I didn’t._ He had doctored the story so much over the years that it had morphed into a fairy tale in which Clarke was an evil villainess who had controlled his every action, and prioritized her own success over his grief. The scissors had become a knife. An inch and a half into his gut had become _all the way to the hilt._ At the end of the story, he offered a small concession, a post-script: he had thrown her against a wall and choked her in self-defense, an absolute last resort. At bars, he told the story with manic glee as if it had been a wild adventure, so many times over so many years that he could barely remember what had actually happened or why. With every sympathetic nod, every _holy shit, dude,_ every ounce of validation he received, he grew more resolved in his actions.

Murphy looked around the room. “Raise your hand if you believe him.”

The group was comprised of a dozen people sitting in a circle of squishy chairs. The room was dimly lit with '80s-looking lamps that you might find at a garage sale. No one raised their hand.

“Stop lying to yourself and us, and tell us what really happened,” Murphy said.

He did, finally, the first time he’d ever said it out loud. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He was expecting disgust or horror, but received only some empathetic head nods. It gave him the courage to admit the other things he’d done to her, and at the end, he said, “After all that I just —” He clutched the yellow folder in his lap, growing thicker by day with each cheesy mental health handout he received. “I don’t think I deserve to be loved, I guess.”

He could feel himself poised at the edge of something. Physically, the beginning of a breath that staggered slowly into his lungs. Emotionally, the endless road of recovery, his path lit by a weak light that allowed him to see only the next step ahead.

“You deserve to be loved,” Murphy said.

“The things I’ve done —” Bellamy tried to reply.

“You deserve to be loved,” the guy beside him, Cali, said.

He couldn’t look up from his feet. His breath stopped. He opened his mouth to argue, but nothing came out.

“You deserve to be loved,” OK said, a woman Bellamy had never even spoken to, who had never shared in group before. The rest of the circle repeated it until they’d made it all the way around, and Bellamy began to cry, something he’d seen happen with a half dozen others over the weeks but never imagined would happen to him, yet there he was, head in his hands, weeping while the group sat silently in witness.

Over the days that followed, Murphy started calling Bellamy out on every single thing he’d ever done wrong, and Bellamy devoured it, took notes, bizarrely thrilled to be given a new lens on an old life. The things he had done were part of his past, who he was, but felt different now, far away like a movie he had watched while distractedly playing on his phone. Something inside him had shifted, a broken gear locked into place, finally churning at the rate it always should have.

“You shouldn’t want to hurt people,” Murphy said over lunch one day. “And you shouldn’t want to be hurt by them. You shouldn’t accept complacency toward your pain, and you shouldn’t accept your own desire to destroy yourself.”

It seemed so obvious, a lesson at the heart of every story ever written, but had somehow flown over his head. He had believed it was his divine gift to hurt, and force that pain on others. That suffering was what it meant to be human, and happiness was a temporary, fleeting thing. His drive to hurt himself and others had directed his entire life. He didn’t know who he was without pain. He’d never even sought pleasure, really, only distractions. That was what it had meant to be with Clarke — one long distraction from his own welling abyss.

“What else do you do? What else is there?” he asked, though he felt stupid for it. His biggest flaw, he realized, wasn’t that he lacked the answers to his problems, but that he couldn’t form the questions.

Murphy was assertive and confrontational, saw through everyone’s bullshit, but he never judged anyone for anything. Answering stupid questions was his forte. He dragged a soggy french fry through a mound of mayonnaise. “Love, man. That’s all that’s left. It’s the easiest and hardest thing there is.”

Bellamy had taken that statement for granted, was only just now, years later in a bathtub with a gun in his hand, feeling the agonizing truth of it. He loved Clarke in a way he wasn’t able to love before, in a way he didn’t know was possible to love. He loved her unconditionally. He loved her for the person she was. He loved her with a complete absence of self. Before, it had been easy to hurt her because it was easy to hurt himself, and he had engulfed her wholly in all the space he took up. Now, the thought of hurting her in any way, lashing out, raising his voice, uselessly defending himself, refusing to listen, threatening her — it felt completely beyond him. Yet, the ways he’d hurt her in the past were still affecting her today. She’d had a child because of his abuse. She almost died. She had trust and intimacy issues. She was the warmest person he’d ever met, and now she knew how to be cold. It didn’t matter that she was fine now, happy and healthy with a beautiful daughter and a flourishing career. The truth was that she would have had all those things anyway, without Bellamy’s abuse. She would have gotten there with less strife and struggle. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, people say, but it wasn’t true — what doesn’t kill you still hurts like hell, and your life would be better without the pain inflicted on you by others.

Somehow, she still loved him. Even if he couldn’t believe it, even if he didn’t deserve it, more than anything, he trusted her. She said she loved him, so that meant she did. And if she loved him, she would be hurt if he died. And so would Madi.

He slid the gun out of his mouth. It left behind a gritty metallic aftertaste. He pulled out his phone and hovered over Clarke’s name for a long beat before clicking on it.

“Hey?” she said. She sounded out of breath but hopeful to be hearing from him. He could hear Madi singing along with the TV in the background. It overwhelmed him — just on the other end of the line, the other side of town, stood the life he could have led.

“Sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry. Nevermind,” and went to hang up.

“Bellamy, wait.”

He paused.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Something’s wrong. Really wrong.”

“How can you tell?”

“I just can.” A clattering sound, and she added, “Hold on one sec.” The line went silent. She had him muted. He thumbed over the ridges of the gun, used the barrel to trace over his scar. He wished she would have killed him.

“Sorry,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing.”

“Then why’d you call?”

“Just wanted to hear your voice.”

“You’re scaring me, Bellamy.”

“I’m fine, really.”

He heard the beep of a car door, the low rumble of an engine.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“The store. Roger’s out of food.”

“I can let you go.”

“Why don’t you stay on the phone with me? Keep me company for a minute.”

“But you’re mad at me.”

“Water under the bridge. We’ve been through worse, right?” She was using her doctor voice on him, the one he long ago made fun of when she made grown-up phone calls. _Thanks so much, mhm, buh-bye!_ He told her the combination of her sexy huskiness paired with measured professionalism made her sound like a shitty phone sex operator. She’d laughed so hard she snorted. Now he couldn’t imagine saying something like that to her, meanness even if teasing in nature, or her going along with it just to avoid a fuss, to be “not like other girls” in her ability to take a joke.

“Do you want to hear about my day?” she asked.

He did. More than anything. “I was in the middle of something. I just called to say hi.”

“Okay, so. First thing this morning, like three dozen roses get delivered to our office, right, for Jackson, of course, and…” She continued on. He sunk deeper into the bathtub and put his phone on speaker, set it on his chest and listened. He placed the gun on the edge of the tub. She went through what seemed like every minute of her day, and brought him up to speed on what he’d missed while they weren’t speaking. Madi got in trouble at school for calling a boy a “fucknugget.” Abby got in trouble at school for defending her granddaughter’s right to say the word “fucknugget.” Roger had a grooming appointment and got a little yellow bandana he wouldn’t let anyone take off. Madi became obsessed with Alanis Morissette and had listened to “Ironic” on repeat approximately five hundred times.

“Like, where did that come from?” Clarke asked. “She’s six. Who saw a grouchy six year old and was like, ‘You seem like the kind of person who would dig Jagged Little Pill.’”

“Maybe she saw something on TV.”

“What is Alanis Morissette even doing now?”

“She was God in the movie Dogma.”

“That was eighty-seven years ago.”

“Maybe she got back together with that guy from Full House. The one ‘You Oughta Know’ is about.”

“If you were God, would you date Dave Coulier?”

“If I were God, I’d date everyone. Deities are sluts.”

Bellamy glanced down at his phone and saw they’d been talking nearly twenty minutes. He should have heard her get out of the car by now and go into the store. Maybe she was waiting in the parking lot.

“Okay,” she said, “your turn.”

“I haven’t been doing anything.”

“What game have you been playing?”

“Monster Hunter World.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You don’t want to hear that.”

“Sure I do. What classes are there?”

“There aren’t classes, really, just weapons.” So he told her about Monster Hunter World, which felt ridiculous, considering this might be the last conversation he would ever have, and he didn’t even like Monster Hunter World that much.

On her side of the line he finally heard her get out of the car. A moment later, a door opened, just as his apartment door opened.

“Clarke,” he said, panicking, but she had hung up already, and a second later she was opening the door to the bathroom.

“I _knew_ it.” She grabbed the gun and expertly slipped the magazine out. When did she learn how to use guns? “Come on, get up.”

“I —”

“You’re not allowed to argue with me right now. Get up.”

So he did, and stepped out of the bathtub. She lifted his arms and inspected him, starting at his wrists and upward, working her way around his body. He swallowed down the swelling feeling in his throat, and shoved aside his instinct to drag her closer, press his body against her and drown in the sweet relief of her presence. She pulled up his eyelids and looked into his eyes, opened his mouth and closed it again.

“Have you been drinking?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Drugs?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Are you lying to me? Look me in the eye.”

He looked her in the eye. Her irises changed color sometimes. Today they were greyish-bluish-greenish like an iced-over pond. “I haven’t had anything.”

She led him out of the bathroom and into the living room, where she gestured for him to sit on the couch, so he did. She banged around in the kitchen for a couple minutes and returned with a bowl of peanut butter chip ice cream. “Eat this.”

“I’m not hungry.”

She looked at him as if to say, _What did I just tell you?_ so he took the bowl from her and ate in little bites, letting it melt and fall down his throat. When he was sick, he only ever wanted ice cream. She remembered that about him.

“Talk to me.” She sat beside him, perched at the edge of the couch, her thigh touching his knee.

“I’ve been talking to you.”

“Tell me what you were thinking. How you got to this.”

“I don’t know.” He used the back of his spoon to squish the ice cream down until it made a hilly land across the bowl. “I’ve been spiraling, I guess. About what Raven said. She’s right about me. About us.”

“She’s right about some things, but not everything. There are some people who can’t change, and some people who can’t forgive. But you’re a person who can change, and I’m a person who can forgive.”

He sucked on his spoon. On the coffee table sat his unpaid electric bill, two weeks late, and he was embarrassed by it, by his entire apartment, by being found half-naked in a bathtub with a gun in his hand. “I don’t think it matters that I’ve changed. I can take accountability for the things I’ve done. I can accept them. But that doesn’t erase them. It doesn’t make them okay. That’s what I can’t live with. As much as I try, I can’t.”

She put her hand on his knee in lieu of offering a solution, or advice, or even disagreement. There was no solution, no epiphany to be had, no more breakthroughs or stark realizations. Just the dark path, his flickering light, and every sluggish step forward he could manage.

“I did everything I was supposed to,” he said. “I got all the help there is to get. I followed all the rules. I eat right and exercise. I’m on medication. I have a therapist. I go to AA. I’m sober. I practice all the things they tell me to practice and believe what they tell me to believe. And it still hurts. Everything hurts.”

Despite his own words, the melting ice cream, their phone conversation, her gentle touch and careful attention — he hurt still, but it was lighter. Different than before. Clarke was helping him focus on the pain, force it into sharp relief rather than a shadow shifting at the edges of his vision. It was all so much easier to face with her beside him, and yet he didn’t feel as if he was using her, just accepting the help she offered freely.

She ran her fingers through his hair. “You can’t choose sobriety when it comes to love. You need to let me love you.”

He closed his eyes and leaned into her touch, and wondered if he could ever return to that sweet boy his mother once loved.

“Look,” she said softly, “why don’t we try this again, as friends. No sex, no flirting, no pressure. Just being here for each other.”

The agreement hovered on his tongue, as difficult to speak aloud as his first admission of being an alcoholic, of having abused the woman he loved. “Okay,” he managed, and just as he had with all his other concessions, he felt at once freed and afraid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Bellamy has some extreme suicidal ideation in this chapter, bordering on intent, and plays with a gun, but ultimately does not hurt himself or make an actual attempt.


	6. Chapter 6

Like rehab, the second try stuck. Maybe Bellamy just always needed to fail first and try again. The wedding must have gotten the tension out of his system — it was easy being friends with Clarke now. Some days they didn’t talk, but most days they did. They stopped falling asleep on the phone at night, limited their calls to only an hour or two. They saw each other at least once a week, usually dinner at her house, and a movie afterward with Madi, who sometimes fell asleep on him. Summer turned to fall and they took up hiking before the weather dipped into cold. Bellamy offered to rake Clarke’s backyard, and when he was done, threw Madi into a giant pile of leaves repeatedly, until Abby caught them and dragged her inside to wash up.

Clarke hosted Thanksgiving at her house and invited all her friends, new and old. Bellamy was terrified, because the old friends had lived through it all and the new friends had heard the stories from the old. Clarke told everyone it was a dry event, and that she didn’t want Madi to be around alcohol at such an impressionable age. No one seemed to question it. Bellamy did most of the cooking. He was too tired and nervous to eat, so he picked at his turkey and listened to the easy banter of Jasper and Monty and Harper and Raven and Shaw and Jackson, and a few other people whose names he didn’t catch. Monty and Harper’s son, Jordan, was a year younger than Madi but they were already best friends, and inhaled their food so they could go back to playing.

After the meal, Monty and Harper insisted on cleaning up, Jasper begrudgingly following. The house had grown hot, and Bellamy slipped out to the back patio to get some air. Jordan and Madi were on the swings, Jordan shouting about how he could get higher than her, Madi standing on her swing rather than sitting, insisting she could go over the top.

Behind him, the door slid open. He expected it to be Clarke checking in on him, or coming out to tell Madi to sit on the swing before she fell and cracked her head open, but it was Raven who sat down beside him and said, “Mind if I smoke?”

Smoking had never been one of Bellamy’s vices. He still, after all these years, despised cigarettes. “Go ahead.”

Jordan jumped off the swing and fell into an easy roll, softened by his puffy coat. He jumped back up and leaves were stuck all over him. “You flew!” Madi said, and Jordan stopped the swing to climb onto it with his feet like Madi was doing. Bellamy should really put a stop to it. But also — it looked fun, and their coats were _so_ puffy.

“Clarke told me you heard what I said,” Raven said, never one for small talk, a Virginia Slim poised between two fingers.

A gust of cold wind blew. A few of the remaining leaves on the old maple fell off and skittered across the neighbor’s rooftop.

“I’m not going to apologize.” Raven tapped her ash into an empty Dora the Explorer bowl. “I stand by what I said. You were never meant to hear it.”

“I understand.”

She glanced at him with an expression somewhere between shock and disgust, like she was surprised by his neutrality, but also still loathed him as a person. “Someone has to look out for Clarke. I won’t let Finn happen again. I won’t let _you_ happen again.”

“I don’t want to happen again either.”

She laughed, a single, mirthless breath. “I was expecting a fight.”

“You can if you want.”

She eyed him skeptically. “I feel like you want me to pity you.”

“Your opinion of me isn’t my business.”

“You’re deflecting.”

“I’m disengaging.”

“You’re fragile now.” She made a hand gesture over his body. “Like any second you could shatter.”

“I’ve always been that way. I just don’t hide it anymore.”

She mulled it over while she took another drag from her cigarette. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

Madi and Jordan were still swinging while standing up, and had begun counting down from ten dramatically. “Come on, guys,” Bellamy said. “Knock it off.”

Madi rolled her eyes like she was already thirteen, but was the first to fall still and plop down on the swing. Eventually Jordan followed.

“We never hated you, you know,” Raven said. “You refused to open up to us. Like you were an accessory Clarke carried around. So when you started treating her like shit, it was like, there was no chance any of us would take your side.”

He felt the smallest urge to defend himself, a weak, young voice saying, _I didn’t know better. I was in so much pain. It wasn’t my fault._ One of the hardest things to accept: everything he did _was_ his fault, but his actions had a greater context that he could only recently see. Context that made him better understand himself and his anger but which didn’t, couldn’t, let him off the hook. And yet his newfound scope of understanding allowed him to be softer toward himself. He used to hate the man he’d been, but now he just felt bad for him.

This conversation wasn’t actually about him, though. It was about their collective past, and Raven’s seeming desire to clear the air in her strange way, to absolve her of the guilt in being the necessary, critical eye over a complicated situation. Some people can forgive, Clarke had said. Raven wasn’t one of those people.

“I know,” he said. Madi and Jordan got bored with the swings, and went to play in the treehouse.

Christmas morning found Bellamy shoveling snow off of Clarke’s driveway, and coming inside to a hot breakfast and an entire living room of gifts. Abby had gone to Florida to visit her aunt, so it was just the three of them watching Madi tear through gift after gift, a mountain of new school clothes, a few toys and stuffed animals. Bellamy had wanted to get her something nice and shiny and new, but toys were expensive, and he wouldn’t have known what to buy anyway.

When Madi had finished demolishing her gifts and there was a small avalanche of wrapping paper in the middle of the living room, Clarke said, “Madi, Bellamy has something to give you, too.”

He didn’t bother wrapping it. It was oddly shaped anyway, and he didn’t know if she’d even like it. But it still worked fine. He handed it to her.

“What is it?” she asked, turning it over in her hands. 

“A Game Boy Color,” Bellamy said. “You play games on it.”

He leaned over and turned it on. It flickered to life and started making noises. Clarke was taking pictures. He’d asked her ahead of time if it was okay to give his old Game Boy to Madi, since she wasn’t big on shoving screens in her daughter’s face. Surprisingly she'd been thrilled by the idea. Madi had a thousand toys to play with, but she immediately hopped onto his lap and asked him how to use it. He’d only brought the one game, Pokémon Yellow, and figured if she liked it, he’d dig through his old stuff and find the rest. She was extremely sharp for a six year old, and he only had to show her what each button did and the premise of the game and she was completely hooked.

She played until she fell asleep for a mid-afternoon nap. While she was out, he and Clarke cleaned up the living room, and Clarke said, “I have something for you.”

“I have something for you too.”

“Me first.” There was one last present under the tree. It was in a foot-long cardboard tube propped in a corner. He opened it, pulled out the thick paper within and unrolled it. It was a full-color painting of his old World of Warcraft main, an orc warrior named Dutchinator, in full armor.

“Holy sh —” he started, looked at Madi and said, “wow. Wow. How did you —”

“You attached screencap to an email in 2007.”

The hours he spent on this character. His guild. The raids, dungeons, grinding. Every morning for years, he woke up, checked the auction house, did the fishing and cooking dailies. 

“What did the email say?” he asked.

“It was one really long paragraph begging me to play with you, and a second, shorter paragraph about how much you loved me and couldn’t wait to —” she stopped, glanced at Madi, and whispered in his ear, “I believe your exact words were ‘eat me out like a three-course meal.’”

He swallowed thickly and could actually feel himself blushing, an extreme rarity for him given his seeming lack of shame. The thought that his life had ever been that — video games and an amazing girlfriend and good sex — sent him into a tailspin that wasn’t at all bad. He could have that again, eventually. He could. It’d been hard, and would continue to be hard, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be good. He wanted to be good. He wanted.

“What about mine?” Clarke asked.

“Oh, uh.” In comparison his gift was tacky. He pulled out a credit-card-sized envelope from his back pocket and handed it to her. She slipped the card out.

“Is this for a massage?” she asked.

“For you and Raven, yeah. And I’ll take Madi that day. Figured you could use a spa day.”

She roped his arms around him and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, I love it.”

She gracefully said nothing about how terrible at gift-giving he used to be. Whenever he gave her something, she asked if it was a bowling ball with BELLAMY etched onto it, a Simpsons reference he never understood until he’d binged the entire series a few years ago. All of his gifts may have well been bowling balls. He bought her things he wanted, gadgets and new technology that he immediately stole back from her once he’d given it. He got her an iPod Nano for her birthday once and then filled it with music from his computer. He thought he was doing her a favor; it used to be pesky work, filling an iTunes library with stolen music. One time he’d forgotten their anniversary and gave her a card from the grocery store, some cheap flowers, and — he cringed to think of it — a twenty-dollar bill.

“Thank you,” he said, embarrassingly choking up looking at the drawing again. She smiled at him and squeezed his knee and placed a soft kiss to his cheek.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you too.”

On New Year’s Eve, Clarke got invited to a handful of parties. She invited Bellamy along, too, but he politely declined (amateur night, he called it) and offered to look after Madi instead. He and Madi had a good time staying up late and playing their respective video games while Disney movies ran in the background. She fell asleep by ten while watching Moana and he covered her with a blanket. Clarke came home at eleven-thirty. Her cheeks were pink like she’d had a drink or two, but she didn’t seem tipsy as much as tired.

“You’re home early,” he said.

She fell onto the couch between him and Madi. She was wearing a tight black dress, heels, and makeup, and she’d done her hair. He wanted to tell her she looked beautiful, but he didn’t. She leaned her head against his shoulder and said, “It was boring.”

“I guarantee this is more boring.”

She made a dissenting noise. He’d put New Year's Rockin’ Eve on, and they watched it muted, the closed caption scrolling past that he didn't bother reading.

“Should we put her to bed?” Bellamy asked.

“No, we’ll wake her up when the ball drops.”

A few minutes later, she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder. At a minute till, he squeezed her thigh, and she in turn lightly shook Madi’s ankle. “C’mon, Madi, it’s time.”

Madi was holding her Game Boy close to her chest. She made a face without opening her eyes and rolled over on the couch, her face pressed against the cushion.

Bellamy unmuted the TV but kept the volume low. The ball dropped and all of Times Square was an explosion of confetti and “Auld Lang Syne.”

“Happy new year,” he said. 

“Kiss me?” she asked.

His heart leapt into his throat. He didn’t know what to say.

“Just one,” she said. “For luck.”

He pressed a quick, light kiss to her lips and tried to pull away, but she dragged him in again by the shirt and he couldn’t let go this time. Her mouth opened under his. It took all his willpower not to drag her onto his lap. She tasted like expensive lipstick and smelled like his favorite perfume and suddenly they were at senior prom making out in the parking lot against his old truck. His mind went blank, body taking over, letting it have what it wanted, which was her, only her, would only ever be her.

“Mommy?” Madi asked.

They broke apart. Clarke held her hand over her mouth. Bellamy stood and turned away and subtly adjusted himself.

“I wanna go to bed,” Madi said.

“Okay, sweetie, come here.” Clarke risked a shy glance at Bellamy before taking Madi upstairs. They didn’t bring it up again.

In March, Clarke called, and instead of saying hello, said, “Mom is moving out.”

Bellamy was emptying his fridge. He inspected a suspicious Tupperware container that may have once held some kind of failed kale-based dish. He threw the entire thing in the trash. “What’d she do this time?”

“She says she wants to move to Vegas.”

“What’s in Vegas?”

“No idea.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, it’s just really dumb living in this huge house with just the two of us. I was thinking of renting out the apartment.”

He inspected a carton of eggs for the expiration date and put them back, even though he couldn’t remember buying them. “Good idea.”

“To someone six-feet tall,” she said.

He made a face at at a bag of what once might have been spinach. “Uh huh.”

“With freckles, preferably. And a cute chin dimple tragically covered by a beard now. And who once built a gingerbread house out of spare RAM he found in his desk drawer.”

He paused in the middle of prying the cellophane off an old tuna casserole. “You want me to move in.”

“I could really use some help taking care of Madi, and you’re not like, doing anything.”

His first thoughts involved all the ways it could go wrong. He didn’t want to be dependent on her emotionally or financially. But the apartment in Clarke’s house was nicer than his current apartment, and dinners with Clarke and Madi were the highlight of his week. To think he could have that every night, and drive Madi to school every morning, and see Clarke every day — he couldn’t deny the thrill he felt at the prospect of their company, of being useful to someone again.

“We’d draw up a lease,” Clarke said. “You’d pay rent. Less than what you’re paying now. Helping with Madi is optional of course.”

“But I’d want to,” he said.

She sounded like she was smiling. “I know, but I don’t want it to be too much. Both of us need to be comfortable pulling the plug if we have to.”

Less than a month later, he was moved in. It depressed him, how easy it was to leave the place he’d been living his entire adult life. He only took a couple car loads of his stuff over to Clarke’s and sold all his furniture. The apartment had its own exit, a sliding glass door that looked over an empty field, and beyond it, the highway. It had a living area and a big television, a bathroom with a jacuzzi, and a kitchenette that had barely been used.

He and Clarke sat down on his first night and drafted up a set of rules and expectations. He was prepared to offer a lot of hard questions and have a brutally honest discussion about their friendship, which was at once painfully awkward but also a relief, to talk about it again for the first time in six months.

“We’re adults,” she said from the opposite side of the kitchen counter. To anyone else, she’d seem steady, confident, but he could feel her trepidation beneath the surface. “We need to be mature about this.”

“Right.”

“I think this is pretty obvious, but it needs said.” Her arms were crossed over her chest. Their evening had been so busy that she was still in her work clothes, a blouse and slacks, work badge clipped to her belt. “I’m in love with you. I always have been and I probably always will be. I know this is deeper and more complicated than that, and I wish I had more control over it, but I don’t. You make me happy. It’s that simple, as much as it’s not.”

He spun his glass of orange juice around. He was too old to be drinking orange juice at night. He’d get heartburn later. “You make me happy too. As happy as someone like me can be, anyway.”

“And do you —” She stopped, looked down and ran her big toe over the line in the tile. “Sorry, you don’t need to tell me that.”

“I. Yeah. It’s the same. For me, I mean. If that’s what you’re asking.”

She looked like she hadn’t expected him to say that, as evidenced by the light flush on her cheeks. “Good. I mean — not good, but. You know what I mean.”

“Do you think we might. You know. Eventually.”

“Maybe. Probably. Just — we’re not in a hurry.”

His silence was agreement enough. She looked at her phone, were she’d made a list of talking points. “Okay, on to Madi. How willing are you to take her to school?”

In the end, Bellamy agreed to take on more responsibility than he anticipated, but he found he didn’t mind it. It was all work he was eager to do, and knew he could do well. Having his rent lowered meant he didn’t have to hustle as hard on the freelance front, and had more than enough time to help around the house. He went to the gym every morning, took Madi to school on his way to the library, and picked her up on his way home. He planned all their meals and did their shopping. At first, Clarke insisted on helping out with the cooking, but, noticing how tired and sometimes grouchy she was after work, Bellamy slowly coaxed her into having a seat and a cup of tea, and soon she gave up entirely — which, given her cooking skills, was a win for everybody.

As he began to feel less like a guest and more like a roommate, with Clarke’s permission he started fixing a few things around the house. When the weather got warm, Clarke designed a deck and picked out furniture, and he built it. They ate their meals outside, drank lemonade, and watched the sunset while Madi played in the backyard. It was in those moments he would catch her looking at him in a strange way, and ask “What?” She would say “Nothing” around a smile and for some reason it would make him smile too, and look away so she wouldn’t see it, wouldn’t see how at peace he felt with her, how deeper in love he was falling.

In June, they celebrated Madi’s seventh birthday. For several hours, the house was filled with kids and balloons and streamers and an expensive tower of cupcakes. A well-meaning mom said Madi looked just like Bellamy. Another referred to Bellamy as Clarke’s husband. Clarke didn’t correct either statement, presumably, Bellamy thought, out of politeness.

His job was to do the background work: manning the grill, replenishing food, filling coolers of pop and juice, taking pictures with Clarke’s DSLR that she’d spent an hour teaching him how to use. Clarke did all the hosting and made sure none of the kids broke their head open on the playground. It was the most stressed out they’d been in years; he could feel the irritation floating off of her, watched as her old self came slowly to the surface. The fastidious perfectionist, spine straight and teeth glinting.  

As Bellamy was setting out bowls of chips, Clarke picked up the tub of dip and said, “What is this?”

He didn’t bother looking up from the massive bowl of Ruffles. “Chip dip.”

She cleared her throat. He glanced up and saw she was holding up the dip, which said, very clearly, VEGETABLE DIP.

“Fuck,” he said. “I’ll go back out.”

“There’s no time. You have to fire up the grill.” Her tone was even but he could hear the disappointment in her voice, imagined that she was thinking about what an idiot he was and forcibly pushing down her frustration.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how much this party means to you.”

She stared at him a long moment, some realization dawning on her face as she set the tub back down, and suddenly the conversation was no longer about chip dip.

“The store is right around the corner,” he offered. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“You’re not upset.”

“Why would I be?”

“I just got mad about chip dip. You’re supposed to be sad or angry or blame me for not telling you the right thing to get.”

“I’m a grown man, Clarke. I should know how to read a label. It's my fault, and I’m sorry.”

She blinked at him, and he opened his mouth to say something else, he wasn’t sure what, but she lunged forward and kissed him. He was almost embarrassed by his own reaction, the speed with which he wrapped his arms around her and returned the kiss. It was hard and brief, a shocking second of slipping her tongue into his mouth, which tasted like sugar from all the candy she’d been stress-eating, and she pulled away. “I love you,” she said, expression unabashedly earnest — exactly how she used to look at him when when they were teenagers, passing each other in the hallway between classes — and headed out the door.

Pike suggested Bellamy take on a sponsee or two, which was going surprisingly well. His therapist lowered his appointments to monthly. He hadn’t been to the diner in weeks. He no longer loitered outside his favorite bar, or stared longingly at the liquor aisle in grocery stores. The pull was still there, still insistent and always would be, but for now, he’d grown stronger against it. He knew there would be times of weakness and doubt, but all he had was the present, and the present was good.

It was August when he realized he was happy.

Early into first grade, Madi had a pressing question to ask. He could tell because she was hiding behind Clarke’s legs, and Clarke was saying, “It’s okay, you can ask him.”

She shook her head and hid entirely behind her mother. It was after dinner, and Bellamy was cleaning up. Madi was in her Spongebob pajamas and her hair was wet from bath time. She’d been quiet all day, but he’d chalked it up to tiredness.

She tugged Clarke’s shirt. Clarke squatted down so Madi could whisper something in her ear.

“You don’t know until you ask,” Clarke said. “You have to be brave.”

Finally Madi approached Bellamy as he was wiping his hands on a towel. She looked up at him and asked, “Will you come to Bring Your Dad to School Day?”

Bellamy looked to Clarke, who was grinning. He felt like he’d just won the Nobel Prize. Strangely he was getting choked up. He had to hold onto the sink.

“Yeah,” he said, but the word cracked. “Of course I will.”

“It’s Wednesday. Don’t be late,” she said, and ran off to the living room.

“Are you sure?” he asked Clarke. He put the steel wool back into the ceramic duck at the top of the sink. “What if she starts calling me Dad?”

“Then she starts calling you Dad.”

“But I’m not —”

“That’s between you and her. You’re the closest thing she’s got, and you’re going to be around a long time.”

He looked around for something to do with his hands, but he’d finished everything already. “Thank you for sharing your family with me.”

She lifted onto her toes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you for being part of our family.”

The careful, distant boundaries he and Clarke had set in the beginning slowly crumbled. They went on walks around the neighborhood with Madi and Roger, and while he always kept his arms at his sides just in case, he never believed she’d take him up on the offer, until one day she slipped her hand into his, fingers entwining easily. Holding hands on their walks became a near-nightly ritual.

Clarke began kissing his cheek before work. Their I-love-yous turned casual and frequent, “See you later, love you,” and “Love you, bye.” He gave her a foot massage after a day in which she attempted to break in a new pair of shoes. One night in September, they were up late talking and looking through Abby’s old photo album, huddled close as they turned pages and Clarke pointed to distant aunts and uncles and cousins and explained who they were. They neared the end of the album, and he caught her eye and couldn’t help himself — he tilted her chin toward him and kissed her, and she kissed back like she’d been waiting for it. Madi was already in bed. His heart pounded all through his body. Clarke crawled onto his lap and kept kissing him.

They hadn’t made out like this since the very beginning, before sex was on the table. He knew they wouldn’t go farther than this, his hands up the back of her shirt, her hips grinding onto his erection. She was wearing shorts and he was wearing sweatpants, and he refused to let himself think about how easy it would be to sink into her. Pick her up and lay her on her back on the couch, go down on her until his jaw went numb. He told her he loved her every day now, multiple times a day. He helped take care of her daughter and dog and house. He gave her everything there was to give. They talked for hours a day about each thought that passed through their minds. But it still wasn’t enough to express all the love he had pressing at his seams.

It wasn’t the same love as before. He harbored no desire to own or control or consume her. This was good love. Painless and simple, the kind so few people know because they spend so much time afraid — of loss and abandonment, of the secret dark inside themselves, of pain. But he had lost her once, and knew his darkness well. He had spent so long in pain, there was nothing left to fear. Murphy was right. Love remained at the bottom of everything, but some people had to dig a long, long way to find it.

She pressed her forehead to his. Her eyes were closed, lips reddened, body hot under his hands. He could still taste her on his tongue.

“I don’t know how we lasted this long,” she said.

He nipped at her chin, trailed down her neck. “We can continue upstairs.”

“Not tonight.”

He slid his hands down her bare thighs and let them rest on her knees. She’d gotten comfortable enough that she'd begun walking around the house braless, wearing thin tank tops. Her nipples peaked against the fabric. He tried not to stare. “Okay.”

She laughed, a high, delighted sound.

“What?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. You being so easy-going. Not begging me or anything.”

“I’m yours when you’re ready for me.”

Her smile faded and her eyes darkened. She kissed him again in a way she’d never done before — like she wanted him, all of him. Like she loved him in the exact shape and size of his love for her.

“You,” she said, and planted another light kiss to his lips, his face held in her hands, “are the most amazing man I’ve ever known, and I’m so grateful to have you in my life again.”

The statement stunned him. He’d come to accept that she loved him, appreciated his presence in her home, but to be grateful for him? No one had ever felt glad to have someone like Bellamy Blake in their lives. Yet he believed her, could see the value he held now, not only to her but to himself, and he knew then — knew with a certainty he’d never held about anything else in his life — that he would never hurt her again.

Early October, she came home late from work, and he didn’t know how he knew, but something was definitely wrong. When he asked, she smiled and said she was fine, and went upstairs to change into sweatpants. She was quiet all night, and went to bed early. They’d begun kissing each other goodnight, sometimes a light peck on the lips, and others, he’d press her against a wall or countertop, or drag her onto his lap, and they’d make out like teenagers. Some nights it physically pained him not to follow her to bed. Tonight, though, she didn’t kiss him, just said a quiet goodnight and went up to her room. He told himself that if she wanted to talk, she knew he was there for her, and if she didn’t, she needed her space.

Around two in the morning, he got up for a glass of water, and saw the light on upstairs. He found Clarke curled on the couch crying. He sat on the other side, put his hand on her ankle and rubbed his thumb in circles.

She wiped her nose with her wrist. "I had a girl come in," she started, and the story came out slowly. Bellamy sat silently and listened. "I’ve been seeing her since she was a baby. She had a fever. Wasn’t eating, and what she did eat, she couldn’t keep down. I gave her antibiotics but they didn’t help, so when she came back, I thought — no, I knew. I could feel it. I told her mom to take her to Children’s right away. She has cancer. She’s —” She took in a quick breath and tracks of tears fell from her eyes. “She’s not going to make it.”

There was nothing he could say to that, so he pulled her in and held her, kissed the top of her head. No lives were at risk with front-end development. He wished he could understand, but it was hard to wrap his head around it.

“I knew this was going to happen someday,” Clarke said. “I knew it, and I still wasn’t ready. You get used to stuffy noses and sore throats and booster shots. You work so hard healing, you forget some of them can’t get better.”

There was nothing to say, no words he could offer that would ever be good enough, so he held her until she stopped crying.

She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Will you sleep in my room? Just for tonight.”

He followed her to bed. It felt normal, going to bed with her, though it shouldn’t have. He held her and she cried for a little longer before finally succumbing to sleep, and soon after, so did he.

The next morning he woke up and she was watching him. He turned away and tried to hide his smile. He hadn’t felt it in so long, the easy thrill of waking up beside her.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re fun to look at.”

“Where’s Madi?” He glanced at the clock. It was a little after six, a Saturday, but Madi was usually running around by now.

“Still asleep, somehow.”

“Holy shit.”

“I know.”

“You feeling better?”

She trailed her fingers down his chest, stopping at his boxers. Her face was puffy from crying all night, and her hair was a mess, and little red creases covered one side of her face where she’d been lying on her pillow, yet she was still gorgeous, still everything he wanted. “A little.”

She dipped her hand lower, grazing his half-hard cock, her lip bitten between her teeth. He hadn’t imagined it would happen like this, though he should have, knowing she was always horniest in the morning. He wasn’t about to say no, not with the watery sun streaming through the window, and a quiet house to themselves.

“Are we doing this now?” he asked.

“Do you want to?”

“You know I want to.”

She slipped out from under the covers and went into the bathroom for a moment, came back out and locked the bedroom door. He stroked himself as she took off her pajamas — a matching fleece set covered in clouds and smiling suns — not even trying to be sexy. He took off his boxers, and she pulled a condom from her bedside drawer.

“Where’d you get that?” he asked.

She looked at him like he was stupid. “The store.”

“I mean, when?”

She shyly fiddled with the packet. “A while ago.”

“Did you have a date?” Surprisingly, the thought of her on a date didn’t bother him nearly as much as the fact she didn’t tell him about it. She told him everything. They were best friends.

“No.”

“Oh."

As touching as the gesture was — she’d prepared for him — he couldn’t help but feel a little smug. “If I’d known, I would’ve gotten tested.”

“I’m not on the pill.” She crawled over his thighs, opened the packet and rolled the condom on him in a single, graceful movement.

“Unless you _want_ to get me pregnant,” she said as she sank down onto him.

“Fuck.” He gripped her thighs. His eyes fell shut and his head tipped back. He hadn’t had sex sober in over a decade, let alone first thing in the morning. Like everything else in life, it was almost too much to bear. “You know I would. In a heartbeat.”

She leaned down and kissed his jaw. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Finally she started moving, slowly lifting her hips and sinking back down onto him, palms firmly on his chest for leverage. “Oh my _god._ I forgot how big you are. Fuck.”

He wanted to make a snarky comment but she started moving faster, and all thoughts ran out of his brain. She was obviously working hard to stay quiet. Madi’s room was on the other side of the wall. He marveled at her as she fucked herself on him, but soon it got to be too much, and he thrust up to meet her movements, an easy rhythm that felt at once new and deeply familiar.

She climbed off of him onto her hands and knees. He settled behind her and entered her again. He ran a hand up her spine into her hair, gripped the roots and pulled gently, until her back was to his chest, her throat exposed to him while he bit rough kisses into it. He fucked her slowly, a hand over her belly, imagining it swelling. 

“You’re quiet,” she said. “And going too easy on me.”

That had been intentional — he assumed his filthy mouth was another of his behaviors she only tolerated. It never occurred to him that she might have liked it, especially considering a good portion of it was derogatory. Dirty little slut, whore, a hole to fuck, the word “mine” spilled out like dandelion seeds in spring. He didn’t want to be that guy anymore, at least not without talking about it first.

Lips by her ear, he asked, “Want it harder, princess?”

She nodded with what limited movement he offered.

“Need you to say it.”

“Fuck me harder. Talk to me. Please.”

He took her wrists and pressed them against the wall, entwined his fingers between hers. Pounded into her hard and fast. It felt too good being old Bellamy again. “Been thinking about my cock, sweetheart? Thinking about this for how long?”

“Never stopped. You’re the only one who fucks me the way I like.”

He continued whispering filthy things in her ear, and she continued stifling her moans. She’d always been loud in bed. In high school, he’d always gotten a thrill out of knowing Clarke Griffin, prim and nerdy, presumed prude, was a freak in the sack.

He moved both of her wrists into one of his hands, and with the other, reached between her legs and flicked her clit. Her body began immediately to tense.  

“Gonna come for me, baby? Gonna come on my cock?”

He felt her trip over an orgasm. When it finally crested over, she began to cry out, and he clapped his palm over her mouth. She fell onto her hands, and he fucked her faster, waited until she was done before stilling inside her and coming hard, biting the inside of his cheek to silence himself.

After, they lay together, sweaty and far apart on the bed, only their hands touching lazily. He rolled his head toward her. She was smiling at him like she was in love with him. It hit him, then: they could really have this. Today, tomorrow, next week, month, year. It was theirs, forever.

“Want to make pancakes?” he asked.

“No, but I want to eat them.”

“Okay, I’ll make pancakes.”

She tucked her head under his chin. “In a minute.”

They’d fallen asleep last night with the window open. The curtains fluttered in the breeze. In the distance, traffic rushed past on the highway. Any minute, Madi would wake up, and they’d start their day.

 

* * *

 

Madi lifted on her toes to peer into the Starbucks bakery case. It was December.

“What do you want?” Bellamy asked.

She pointed to a white cake pop with red and green sprinkles. The barista plucked it from the box. Bellamy ordered a peppermint hot chocolate. Clarke got a black coffee. They settled at a table in a corner, Clarke with her laptop, Madi a coloring book. The place was emptier than he wanted it to be.

“Do I look okay?” he asked.

Clarke looked him over. “You look great.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“You’ll do fine. Just stick to the script.”

Kane had been easy. He was doing well with the company, making bank. They’d met over lunch last month. Kane said he understood, no hard feelings, wished Bellamy the best of luck, and went back to work. Bellamy couldn’t get ahold of Gina. She went off the map — no social media, phone number disconnected. He thought he remembered her saying something about traveling, so maybe she was just away. Echo had been tough. She brought her boyfriend Roan, and both of them stayed stoic and nearly silent the entire time while Bellamy floundered his speech, until the end, when Echo agreed amends had been made, and asked him to please never contact her again.

He kissed Clarke’s temple and ruffled Madi’s hair — she swatted his hand away — and took a seat at an empty table near the door. Clarke glanced at him from the other side of the room and gave him a thumbs up. He took his list out of his pocket. This one was much shorter than Clarke’s.

_I pushed you away after Mom died. I missed your graduation. I resented you for being happy._

Octavia came in, then, and glanced around anxiously. When finally she spotted him, her face lifted into a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know how this fic happened. Thanks so much for reading!
> 
> Major thanks also to jasperjoordan for her relentless and wonderful cheerleading, and for [a gorgeous gifset](https://bettsfic.tumblr.com/post/183969098157/moderation-step-9-make-amends-with-those-we-have). Also check out [this amazing photoset](https://eyessharpweaponshot.tumblr.com/post/186091803329/maybe-because-what-he-and-clarke-had-was-really) by eyesharpweaponshot!


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